"The Goddess is angry.
She needs rest."
On Earth Day 2026, we gathered for the fifth conversation in the Glacier Dialogues series, and we asked the question that sits at the centre of the cryosphere crisis but rarely makes it into climate finance papers, adaptation plans or hazard maps: what happens when glaciers retreat and people are forced to move?
The question is not new. People have always moved with weather, with rivers, with seasons. What is new is the speed, the scale and the silence around it. In the Hindu Kush Himalaya, a region that holds more frozen water than any place on Earth outside the poles, climate migration is no longer a future risk. It is a current condition. It moves through villages slowly, through families quietly, through young people who simply leave because they see no future. And it moves suddenly too — through floods that cross borders without consulting governments and arrive in valleys that did not know they were downstream.
Our two speakers — Dr Anamika Barua, Professor of Ecological Economics at IIT Guwahati, and Nidhi Jamwal, an independent climate journalist with two decades of field reporting from the Himalayan region — between them held the question from both ends. Dr Barua asked it at the scale of basins, institutions and nations. Nidhi held it close, through a single grandfather in the Khumbu region of Nepal who told her, simply, that the Goddess is angry, and she needs rest.
Water Is Not Just Water
Dr Barua opened with a deceptively simple question. When we talk about water, what are we actually talking about? Most of the science we have inherited treats water as a physical resource — flow, volume, timing, glaciers, rainfall, runoff. That science is essential. It tells us what the ice is doing. But it cannot tell us what people will do.
Two communities living on the same river, experiencing identical hydrology, can have entirely different outcomes. The difference does not lie in the river. It lies in who controls access, who bears risk, who is heard in policy rooms, what infrastructure has been built and on whose behalf. Floods are rarely just natural events; embankments raised to control them often raise riverbeds and intensify the next flood. Scarcity is rarely just about absolute water — it is about uneven access. Adaptation is rarely uniform — wealthier and more powerful groups adapt easily; women, small farmers, informal settlers and nomadic herders carry the burden.
"Water systems are not just natural systems. They are combinations of nature and society. Understanding rivers requires understanding societies."
— Dr Anamika Barua, IIT GuwahatiThis is the field of socio-hydrology: the study of the two-way relationship between water and society, of feedback loops, governance, behaviour and power. It is also a quiet warning. If our climate adaptation strategies treat water as purely physical, they will fail in exactly the places that need them most.
The Geography of Asymmetry
Dr Barua's home river is the Brahmaputra — glacier-fed, climate-sensitive, transboundary across China, India, Bhutan and Bangladesh, marked by extreme floods and deep vulnerability. It is also the cleanest available illustration of what happens when a river crosses borders but governance does not.
Upstream actors hold strategic control over the timing, quantity and even the quality of water. Data is shared selectively, late, or not at all. The India-China memorandum on hydrological data sharing has lapsed and has not been replaced. The India-Bangladesh Joint River Commission, on paper a permanent institution, cannot take meaningful decisions on its own. The Ganges Treaty expires in December 2026 and serious renegotiation has barely begun. The Brahmaputra Dialogue, the only Track-1.5 platform that brought all four riparian countries to the same table between 2013 and 2018, was lost to the pandemic and has not resumed.
The principal product of that dialogue, Dr Barua observed, was trust — not a treaty, not a quantified water-sharing agreement, but the simple capacity of officials and academics from neighbouring countries to believe that the people across the table were not lying. Trust may be the single most underrated currency in transboundary climate diplomacy. We have very little of it, and the cost of that deficit is paid by people who live downstream.
What Is Happening to the Goddess
If Dr Barua mapped the system, Nidhi grounded it. Her stories came from the Khumbu region of Nepal, the high valley around Mount Everest, and from a single house in Namche Bazar where she met Kancha Sherpa, the last living high-altitude porter from the 1953 Hillary-Tenzing expedition. He was twenty in 1953. He passed away in October 2025, at ninety-two.
Kancha Sherpa, Namche Bazar · Photo: Nidhi Jamwal, May 2024 · Used with permission · "But the Mother Goddess is angry now."
Kancha grew up in a culture that did not have recreational climbing as a category. The peaks were mothers. Sagarmatha — Mount Everest — was the abode of Goddess Chomolungma. Sister peaks watched her. Hunting was banned. Forests were tended by village development committees. Yaks were the entire economy: milk, cheese, transport, trade. To climb a mother was incoherent. As Kancha put it to Nidhi: can you conquer your mother? You ask for her forgiveness before you set foot on her.
What he told her, simply and without metaphor, was that the Goddess is now angry. That she needs rest.
It would be easy to read this as folklore. It is also remarkably accurate field data.
"For us, mountains are part of our culture, of our heritage. We connect with mountains and glaciers at a very different level. Science alone will not help us save glaciers."
— Nidhi Jamwal, Climate JournalistThe community in Khumbu has watched winter snowfall decline. Rainfall has become erratic; thunderstorms have grown more frequent. Mosquitoes have appeared in Namche Bazar, a town where they had no business being, with implications for public health in a region whose nearest hospital is days away. Yak breeding seasons are shifting because yaks are seasonal breeders dependent on body mass, and body mass depends on pasture, and pasture depends on a climate that has changed. India's livestock census recorded an approximately twenty-five percent fall in yak population between 2012 and 2019, with the steepest decline in Jammu and Kashmir. Comparable reports are now coming in from Arunachal Pradesh.
The ecology of the Khumbu · Rhododendron forest, the Dudh Koshi river, and yaks — described by the Sherpa community as the lifeline of the region · Photos: Nidhi Jamwal · Used with permission
The Khumbu Glacier, on which Everest Base Camp sits, is thinning and sinking. An estimated 197 million cubic metres of ice melted from it between 1984 and 2015. Active discussions are underway to relocate the base camp by two to four hundred metres because the ground beneath it is no longer stable. The Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), an NGO of local Sherpa villages, collects more than 30,000 kilograms of waste from the mountain in a 70-day season; the entire Khumbu region has no wastewater or sewage treatment plant. Drang Drung Glacier, in Ladakh, feeding the Zanskar River, has been retreating at roughly 50 metres a year since 2017.
Dudh Koshi · Everest Base Camp (5,364 m) · Khumbu Glacier · Photos: Nidhi Jamwal · Used with permission · An estimated 197 million cubic metres of ice melted from the Khumbu glacier between 1984 and 2015.
When Kancha Sherpa says the Goddess is angry, he is reading a dataset. It is just one our policy frameworks do not yet know how to hold.
We All Live Downstream
Glaciers and the floods they release do not respect borders. In April 2000, a temperature-driven landslide in Tibet Autonomous Region deposited around 300 million cubic metres of debris across the Yigong river in eight minutes. Two months later, the resulting dam breached. The flood killed thirty people in Arunachal Pradesh, India; over a hundred more were missing. In October 2023, the South Lhonak Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) in Sikkim travelled 385 kilometres along the Teesta and reached Bangladesh.
This is the reality that threads through every conversation we have had about cryosphere risk: every Himalayan country is downstream of someone. The absence of cross-border data sharing is no longer a diplomatic inconvenience. It is a life-safety failure.
The Gap We Keep Mislabelling
A second thread Dr Barua drew is structural and easy to miss. Reviewing the Indian adaptation literature systematically, her team found that what is being called adaptation is, very often, coping — short-term response to the most recent shock. Adaptation effort is concentrated in agriculture, where it is most measurable, and almost absent in health and water. Most interventions assume homogeneity across communities and prescribe technocratic solutions. The same intervention is rolled out in Spiti and Sikkim and the Sundarbans.
Adaptation, as one of our participants asked during the Q&A, has no single blueprint. It is context-specific by definition. And — Dr Barua's quiet provocation — much of what we ought to be calling adaptation is in fact basic development. Connectivity that lets a stranded village call for help. Schools and clinics that build the human capacity to absorb shocks. Roads that allow rescue without taking the valley apart. Where these are absent, climate adaptation is also absent.
Dr Barua's distinction between coping and adaptation is not pedantic. When short-term shock response is funded and counted as adaptation, the actual work of building long-term resilience remains undone. The same logic explains why basic mountain infrastructure — connectivity, health, schools, weather services — must be recognised as climate adaptation in its own right. Without this redefinition, adaptation remains a reporting category, not a programme of work.
This is uncomfortable for a sector that prefers measurable, single-issue programmes. It is also true.
The Path Forward
The Voice of Glaciers Foundation is early in its journey. We are not in a position to claim that we will fix any of what we have just described. What we can do is convene, curate, and carry the conversation into rooms where it has not yet arrived. Several specific intentions emerged from this dialogue, and we are taking each forward in conversation with our speakers and our wider expert panel.
A focused programme for cryosphere journalism
We are exploring a focused programme to train and sensitise journalists on transboundary cryosphere reporting — an idea Nidhi proposed directly during the session. The current pool of journalists equipped to navigate the science, the politics and the field realities of transboundary rivers is small. A modest first cohort, of fifteen to twenty-five reporters across the wider Hindu Kush Himalaya, would meaningfully shift the quality of public conversation on these issues.
A wider Glacier Dialogues table
We are widening the Glacier Dialogues series itself to include voices from Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and eventually from comparable cryosphere geographies — the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps. Climate migration in the Hindu Kush is not a uniquely Indian story; it is a planetary one. Our friends from the wider region must hold the microphone.
Glaciers as living entities
We are carrying the cultural and spiritual framing of glacier loss into our public-facing work — into our murals, our memory installations, our forthcoming children's book on glaciers and our editorial. The North Star of our foundation is a world in which glaciers are protected legally and culturally as living entities. Kancha Sherpa already lived in that world. We have something to learn from him.
Bridges across disciplines
We are building bridges between disciplines and across roles. The single most consistent theme of the evening, across speakers and questioners, was that the boundaries that have organised our work — between glaciologists and social scientists, between scientists and journalists, between scientists and the communities they study — are exactly the boundaries that have to come down. Dr Bryan Mark — Professor of Geography at The Ohio State University and a glaciologist whose field work spans the Andes — joined our Q&A from the United States and described an Andes field workshop in which scientists, graduate students and journalists spent days together at glacier sites, digging snow pits and asking each other questions. We would like to pilot something similar in the Indian Himalaya.
Dignity Is the Question
We chose Earth Day for this conversation because Earth Day is the day on which we are asked to confront how we live on the planet. The most honest answer we have is that millions of people in glacier-dependent regions are already adjusting to a planet that is no longer the one they were born into, and they are doing so without very much help.
Climate migration, when it begins, is not only the loss of a place. It is the loss of what a place held. Calendar. Memory. Language. Ritual. The relationship between a child and a mountain. None of this is replaceable by a policy.
Our work, modestly, is to make sure that as glaciers retreat, dignity does not.
Water systems are socio-ecological, not hydrological. The same hydrology produces completely different outcomes for two communities on the same river. Governance, power and infrastructure decide who is harmed and who is spared.
Trust is the most underrated currency in transboundary climate diplomacy. The Brahmaputra Dialogue (2013–2018) produced no treaty — its principal output was the capacity of officials and academics from four countries to believe each other.
The cultural and spiritual dimension of glacier loss is also a dataset. When a Sherpa elder says the Goddess is angry, he is summarising decades of declining snowfall, erratic rainfall, retreating ice, and the appearance of mosquitoes in towns where they did not belong.
Glaciers and the floods they release do not respect borders. The October 2023 South Lhonak GLOF travelled 385 kilometres from Sikkim to Bangladesh. Every Himalayan country is downstream of someone.
Much of what is being called adaptation is in fact coping, or is in fact basic development. Connectivity, schools, health and weather services are climate adaptation infrastructure. Where these are absent, climate adaptation is also absent.
The boundaries that have organised climate work — between glaciologists and social scientists, between scientists and journalists, between scientists and communities — are exactly the boundaries that have to come down. Field-based interdisciplinary collaboration is the most viable path forward.
The Glacier Dialogues Continue
Each month, the Glacier Dialogues series brings together scientists, communities, journalists and policymakers to build the conversations that glacier preparedness demands. Session 6 will be announced shortly.