This year’s International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction falls under the theme “Resilience Starts at Home,” a reminder that a warning which never reaches a household is no warning at all. I keep coming back to a single image from a week I spent in Kathmandu, in a room full of experts from India, China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal, working on something that sounded bureaucratic at the time and reads as urgent now: mountain-specific indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation, which fed into Pakistan’s submissions ahead of COP30 last year- work that continues now as countries prepare for COP31 in Antalya this November. Somewhere in those sessions, the Hindu Kush-Himalaya stopped looking like a set of national territories and started looking like what it actually is: one continuous system of ice, rock and permafrost, warming at roughly twice the global average, with no border lines running through it even though our governments insist on drawing them.

Pakistan has spent years treating water diplomacy as something that happens with India, over the Indus Waters Treaty, while leaving the actual source of that water almost entirely unmonitored multilaterally.

Pakistan has spent years treating water diplomacy as something that happens with India, over the Indus Waters Treaty, while leaving the actual source of that water almost entirely unmonitored multilaterally.

On August 26, that system reminded everyone which map is real. A slope above Nepal’s Trishuli valley gave way, and within days more than a........

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