In a Nepali valley, a farmer points to where the glacier stood in his boyhood, now retreated far up the slope. The high mountains are losing their ice, and the consequences travel downhill towards some of the most densely populated lands on Earth. That slow change now meets a familiar disruptor: forecasters expect an El Niño from mid-2026, with implications from the Pacific to Bangladesh’s floodplains.
El Niño is one half of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a natural seesaw in which warm Pacific water sloshes eastward, rearranging weather worldwide. The cycle is ancient, not caused by climate change, but a warmer ocean gives each event more energy. Its effects are uneven; the one that matters here is a suppressed monsoon over much of South Asia, where roughly a billion people depend on summer rains.
The World Meteorological Organization now estimates around an 80 per cent likelihood of El Niño during June-August 2026 and a near- or above-90 per cent likelihood that it persists until November. Most models point to at least a moderate, possibly strong event, though the spring predictability barrier leaves peak strength uncertain. The South Asian Climate Outlook Forum projects below-normal rainfall during the June-September monsoon, strongest over central areas, with above-normal temperatures.
The Himalaya and wider Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, the third pole, holds more snow and ice than anywhere outside the Arctic and Antarctic. That ice is vanishing fast, a decline called ‘unprecedented’ in the late Holocene. High Mountain Asia could lose a third to two-thirds of its glacier mass by 2100; even the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target would erase about a third. Mass loss in Nepal’s Langtang region more than doubled, from about -0.21 metres of water equivalent per year in 1974-2006 to -0.45 in 2006-2015. Near Everest, past warming has already committed the Khumbu Glacier to losing 10-23 per cent of its mass this century and up to 70 per cent under intermediate emissions by 2100. El Niño is woven in: its phases shift deposits of heat-absorbing black carbon and soot from brick kilns and fuel, speeding melt while weakening the snowfall that replenishes the ice.
Loss and damage is written into the landscape. Retreating glaciers leave unstable lakes that can burst in glacial lake outburst floods. Nepal’s proglacial lakes grew 181 per cent in number and 82 per cent in area between 1997 and 2017. The 1985 Dig Tsho flood in the Khumbu destroyed a nearly finished hydropower plant, with losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The harm is rarely only physical: in places meltwater irrigates nearly all cultivated land, and households report declining crops, drying springs and falling fish. When water, food, energy and income are squeezed at once, families face migration, a loss no insurance captures. Nepal is a sentinel: it draws most of its electricity from hydropower, much of it from run-of-the-river plants sensitive to flow and flood damage.
What happens on the roof of Asia does not stay there. More than 800 million people live in the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra catchments, relying on glacier and snowmelt. Bangladesh sits at the end, where those rivers converge, a nation built on borrowed Himalayan water and sediment. The risk is double: as glaciers melt, rivers may run higher and more erratically, raising flood danger; once the ice passes peak water, dry-season flows fall, sharpening drought. Bangladesh is already facing sea-level rise, cyclones and salinity intrusion. If the 2026 monsoon is weaker because of El Niño, these problems could become even worse.
This is where science meets fairness. Highland Nepal and deltaic Bangladesh have contributed almost nothing to the emissions melting the ice yet sit on the front line, climate change a threat multiplier striking the most vulnerable hardest. Their losses fall under loss and damage: impacts that can no longer be prevented or adapted to. The UN’s Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage was built for this gap, and analysts argue it needs a dedicated finance facility to channel rapid and long-term support to exposed communities.
These mountain peaks store huge amounts of water in their glaciers, built up over thousands of years, but that precious reserve is now melting away within the span of a single generation.When the mountains melt, Nepal feels it first, but Bangladesh inherits the consequences through the rivers that bind them. The 2026 El Niño layers sharp shocks onto that slow loss. Protecting these mountains and the communities below them is no charity towards a far-off place: for Nepal and Bangladesh alike, it is a matter of shared water, shared risk and a shared future.
