On 16 August 2024, a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) tore through Thame, a 3,800-metre Sherpa village in Nepal's Everest region. The disaster was triggered by a cascading failure of two glacial lakes above the settlement, set off by rising temperatures and heavy rainfall, and the floodwaters reached the village within roughly half an hour of the initial breach. Homes, a school, and a health post were destroyed. One hundred and thirty-five people were displaced, though remarkably no lives were lost, largely because most residents were away at the weekly Namche market when the flood struck. Nepal's own hydrology department later linked the event directly to warming, noting that average temperatures in the area had risen sharply in the days before the flood. What happened afterward in Thame is a useful case study in how civil society, acting largely on its own initiative, can respond to climate disaster not only by rebuilding what was lost, but by protecting the knowledge that makes future survival possible.
Recovery began quickly on the physical front. Because the flood struck during daylight, most residents reached higher ground in time, and within weeks the forty-six displaced schoolchildren had resumed classes nearby. The Khumbu Electricity Company, a locally run utility, restored the village's hydropower supply in just eighteen days, and Nepal's rural municipality allocated funds for rebuilding homes, roads, and bridges. This kind of response, fast, self-organised, and largely independent of outside contractors, is a familiar pattern in civil society's response to climate disasters. What is less familiar, and more instructive, is what Thame did next.
The flood swept away the village's sacred Mani stones, carved scripture stones central to Sherpa ritual life, and for ten months afterward the community performed no rituals at all. Rather than treating this loss as separate from disaster recovery, the community treated it as part of the same problem: the knowledge embedded in its culture, about the land, the seasons, and how to live safely in this environment, was as vulnerable to the flood as any building. If that knowledge was not captured, the next generation would inherit a landscape without the accumulated understanding that had helped previous generations manage it.
In response, Thame partnered with UNESCO to document and formalise that knowledge before more of it was lost. Working within the framework of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems programme, more than thirty local stakeholders, including Indigenous youth, women's groups, and monastery leaders, took part in identifying and validating an inventory of eight living-heritage elements: traditional food knowledge, craftsmanship, cosmology and nature knowledge, and festival and ritual practices. Several of these, particularly the cosmology and nature knowledge and traditional farming practices, are not merely symbolic; they encode generations of observation about seasonal risk, land use, and environmental change specific to this valley.
Capturing them was not an act of nostalgia but an act of knowledge management.
This is what makes the initiative a genuine civil society climate response rather than a cultural side project. The resulting inventory is being considered for Nepal's National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and, more significantly, its findings are expected to feed directly into the revision of the Sagarmatha National Park Management Plan. In practice, this means locally held ecological knowledge, gathered and validated by the community itself, is set to shape official disaster planning for the wider region, rather than remaining folklore disconnected from policy. The entire process followed the principle of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, meaning the community, not UNESCO, decided which knowledge was recorded and how it was represented, ensuring that the information feeding into climate planning stayed accountable to the people who hold it.
Thame's experience suggests a specific model for civil society's role in climate adaptation: communities do not only need help rebuilding physical infrastructure after a disaster; they need support capturing and formalising the knowledge that disasters put at risk of disappearing, so it can inform how future risk is managed. This reframes intangible cultural heritage from a matter of sentiment into a matter of practical resilience: the people who have farmed, foraged, and navigated a particular valley for centuries hold information about that landscape that no outside agency can independently generate, and losing it quietly, alongside the physical damage of a disaster, would be a second, less visible loss. The risk in the Himalaya has not passed. Several glacial lakes above Thame remain classified as high or moderate risk, and similar floods have since struck other Nepali villages, including Tilgau in 2025. Engineering measures such as riverbank stabilisation and early-warning stations will help, but Thame's case argues that local knowledge, properly documented and given real standing in official planning, is itself a form of climate infrastructure, and one that only the community holding it can supply.
About the author
Priyanka Makhijani Postgraduate student, Department of Public Policy, Ramaiah University of Applied science.
