“The Ice Failed Upstream. The Debt is Downstream,” written by Professor of Geography and the Environment Farhana Sultana, was published in Counterpoint. Following is an excerpt:

As glaciers thin, meltwater gathers in lakes held back by loose moraine, and warming thaws the permafrost that binds rock at altitude. The response so far has been to fit each arrangement to the disaster that already happened, while the hazard moves to uncertain terrain no arrangement covers.

The Trishuli becomes the Narayani, then the Gandak, and joins the Ganges in Bihar. That water reaches us in Bangladesh as the southernmost part of the delta. The corridor that killed people and washed away villages is the upper reach of the basin whose treaty we are about to renegotiate.

The 1996 Ganges Treaty expires this December, and its renewal will be negotiated against flow assumptions drawn from a historical record that the river is steadily departing from. Dhaka and Delhi will bargain over the division of a regime the mountains are already rapidly rewriting.

Nepal sits at the head of that catchment and Bangladesh at its end, and neither had much hand in the warming now reshaping it. Nepal accounts for roughly a tenth of 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and Bangladesh for well under 1%.

Neither country built the fossil economy whose warming is destabilizing ice across the range, and neither commands the emissions decisions that will determine how much more of it fails.

I have described this as climate coloniality, the ongoing working of colonial and capitalist power to determine whose land is made unlivable, whose knowledge counts as credible, and whose institutions decide what will be done.

The people in Nepal and Tibet who faced this massive disaster live beneath a danger produced elsewhere, on a stretch of river no arrangement has made a standing obligation to watch.