'Energy security and disaster resilience cannot be planned in silos.' Evaluate in the context of Himalayan hydropower.

On 26 August 2026, a glacier collapse in a watershed shared by Nepal and Tibet sent a flash flood through Rasuwa. It damaged roads, bridges and hydropower facilities and cut off whole valleys [1]. Hydropower is built to give energy security, but here it became a point of disaster exposure. The statement therefore largely holds, with some qualifications.

Why the statement holds

• Concentrated risk: eight hydropower projects were completely damaged, including the 111 MW Rasuwagadhi and 216 MW Upper Trishuli-1 plants [2]. Plants built one after another in the same steep valley share one hazard path, so a single debris flow hits all of them together.
• Shared lifelines: 41 km of road and 24 bridges were lost [2]. The same roads serve both the dams and the villages, so relief had to be flown in by helicopter.
• India's parallel: in 2023, the South Lhonak GLOF breached the Teesta-III dam at Chungthang in Sikkim. ICIMOD has called for mandatory risk assessments for hydropower projects near glacial lakes [3].
• Transboundary blind spot: the 2026 flood started in Tibet and hit Nepal [1]. Upstream hazard data sits in another country, beyond any single project's planning.

Where the statement needs qualification

• Hydropower is not the villain: it is the region's main source of clean baseload power (steady round-the-clock supply) and export income. Abandoning it would hurt both energy security and climate goals. The fix is to make projects resilient, not to halt them.
• Real trade-offs: higher design-flood standards, hazard zoning and warning systems raise capital costs. Some sites may stop being viable.
• Frameworks exist but stay separate: NDMA's 2020 GLOF Guidelines set out stakeholder roles [4], but they are not built into project clearance and power-sector planning.

Way forward

• Basin-level cumulative hazard assessment before approving any project in a river corridor.
• Revise design floods and sediment loads using climate projections, not only past records.
• Glacier and slope monitoring linked to early warnings that reach the last village.
• India–Nepal–China data-sharing on shared Himalayan basins.

Rasuwa and Teesta-III show that an energy asset left exposed to hazards is a liability, not security. The statement is valid, with the rider that resilience should be built into hydropower rather than replacing it. Planning each river basin as one system, in line with the Sendai Framework goal of reducing disaster losses to critical infrastructure, can make Himalayan power both secure and safe.