Cascading Hazards, Convergent Vulnerabilities, and Climate Justice in the Langtang Valley of Nepal
Topics:
Keywords: disaster, climate change, vulnerability, climate justice, climate science, cryosphere, knowledge politics, avalanche, Himalayas
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Authors:
Austin Lord, University of Toronto
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Abstract
On the 25th of April in 2015, the Gorkha Earthquake triggered a massive co-seismic glacier avalanche that destroyed the village of Langtang and took over 300 lives, releasing nearly as much force as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The Langtang Disaster, I argue, is best understood as the synchronic intersection of three distinct and intersecting disasters: an earthquake, a swarm of avalanches, and the slow-onset disaster of climate change. Dozens of avalanches came down that day in the Langtang Valley due to highly unstable and irregular patterns of snowpack (est. ~250-year recurrence interval, Fujita et al 2017) shaped by multi-scalar patterns of climatic volatility. Such cascading hazards and other extreme flow events are projected to become increasingly common as the Himalayan cryosphere continues to warm, melt, and shake.
Thinking about the complexity of these intersecting hazard regimes probabilistically leads rapidly into abstract modeling exercises and realms of deep uncertainty. In contrast, this paper examines the convergent vulnerabilities of the Langtang Disaster in ways that foreground the situated knowledge, empirically driven models, and disaster risk mitigation strategies of the Langtangpas, who have been living and dying with avalanches for centuries. What can we learn from the new patterns of dialogue, subjectivity, and epistemic entanglement which the Langtang Disaster catalyzed? Whose uncertainties come to matter in processes of hazard zoning and disaster risk reduction? How might thinking about convergent vulnerabilities in Langtang lead us forward toward the difficult and urgent questions of climate justice, or toward a more response-able form of climate science?
Cascading Hazards, Convergent Vulnerabilities, and Climate Justice in the Langtang Valley of Nepal
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract