On 26 August 2026, five-year-old Ishara Tamang watched the flood take her mother.

"My mother was swept away. I jumped and moved forward, then got trapped in the net," she told rescuers afterward, from a hospital bed in Kathmandu, in reporting on flood survivors' accounts. She had been near her home in Khalte village, Rasuwa district, when the water came. She jumped, got tangled in a rescue net, and was pulled out alive, injured and alone. When she woke in hospital, she could tell staff one thing that mattered: her father was in Kathmandu. Her mother is still missing.

A little further down the same valley, Nepali Army soldiers waded into the water near Betrawati to pull out a pair of infant twins stranded by the rising river. What happened next was filmed and shared widely: women soldiers wrapping the babies in blankets, cradling them, rocking them amid the disaster (watch here).

In another clip that travelled just as fast, a Nepal Army officer holds a child too frightened to say who she is. "Don't worry," she tells her. "Your mother will come." (watch here) Nobody around her knew, in that moment, if that was true.

A five-year-old does not need to understand a glacier to know her mother is gone. A soldier does not need a science degree to know a frightened child needs to be held. But the rest of the story is what put that child in the water, and it starts high in the mountains, long before the flood ever reached her village.

This is part of "Climate Change, Explained Like You're 10", The Better India's series that connects the things you see around you to a warming planet, in language simple enough to explain to your children. Sometimes climate change costs a family its mother. This is what that costs, and why, explained as simply as we can.

What actually happened

A huge section of glacier and rock collapsed near the Nepal-Tibet border, sending a wall of water, ice, rock and mud into communities along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers. Rivers rose by several metres within minutes; roads, bridges and homes disappeared.

At first, some reports suspected an earthquake. Satellite images told a different story: a large section of glacier near the Langtang region had broken away, sending ice and rock crashing into the Lhende Khola river, and the debris flow became a flash flood moving at over 160 km/h in places.

The human cost of climate change

Nepal's flood produced a great many numbers. By the United Nations' last count,more than 900 people had been confirmed dead and over 4,200 remained missing, making this Nepal's deadliest disaster........

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