Sometimes, a disaster is not just a disaster. It is a warning we choose not to hear. On 26 August, we saw the catastrophic 2026 Nepal flash flood and debris flow tragedy, which wiped out thousands of human lives and affected lakhs of livelihoods. Nepal paid the price of human greed. Nepal paid the price of overconsumption by so-called developed countries. As a result, they are asking for damages from those countries, and rightly so. Irony is that we humans call ourselves the most intelligent species on Earth. Over the years, we have proved that right too. We flattened forests to build cities, sent rockets and satellites into space, discovered atoms, successfully mapped the human genome and created technologies that can connect almost every corner of the planet. "Yet, we are struggling with something far more fundamental, the simplest lesson of all: how to live on this planet and coexist with nature."
We developed in terms of lifestyle, birth rates and life expectancy but forgot to think about a basic question: all 'development' at what cost? Maybe the question is not whether we have developed enough. Maybe it is whether we have developed without thinking enough about the cost of that development. By now that contradiction should have been troubling us. Alas! We are still oblivious to it. The Nepal flood was believed to happen because of glacier breakdown.
The Nepal crisis is believed to have happened because of an exceptionally strong glacier collapse and debris flow. This crisis is a wake-up call for everyone. The climate crisis is not only about rising temperatures, melting glaciers or extreme weather. It is about how we define intelligence, progress and human success. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Year 2015–2025 data were the 11 warmest years ever recorded. In 2025, global temperatures were about 1.43°C above the average. (WMO, State of the Global Climate 2025)
The ocean reached another record level of heat content. Irony is that the oceans absorb the vast majority of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. We should not confuse these with merely numbers describing a distant environmental problem rather they are signals from the system that keeps us alive.
We are in control. Are we?
Since the beginning of human civilization we have been under the impression that nature is something we can control. And with this arrogance we started taming nature. We cleared forests to build cities. We diverted rivers to build dams and to produce electricity. We extracted minerals from the earth. We altered landscapes, engineered coastlines and consumed resources at a scale no other species has ever approached. And all this has been done in the name of development. To make our human lives easier.
Of course much of this has improved human life. There is nothing wrong with wanting a better life. Development has improved human lives in many ways. The problem begins when we stop asking what that development is costing us. For many people, development means a better house, a better road, electricity, a stable job and a better life for their children. The question is whether we can create that development without making someone else pay the environmental cost.
The problem is not that humanity progressed. The problem is that we began confusing the ability to do something with the wisdom to know whether we should. Technology has made us extraordinarily powerful. But power and intelligence are not the same thing. A species can be technologically advanced and ecologically foolish. This is the uncomfortable question climate change is asking us.
Maybe true intelligence is not just about what we can build or achieve. It is also about knowing what we should protect and when we need to stop. What if our greatest achievement has also become our greatest blind spot?
When everything becomes progress
Now we are only interested mainly in the rise in GDP, Production and Consumption. More roads are built. More homes are being constructed. The more unsettling possibility is that we may be the ones who fail to adapt to the conditions that made our civilization possible. We may have learned how to manipulate nature without learning how to live with it. The future, then, will not be decided only by how advanced our technology becomes. It will be decided by whether our wisdom can catch up with our power. The real test of civilization may be whether the most intelligent species on Earth can finally learn how to coexist with the world that sustains it.
But we never think about the cost we are paying for this: Polluted air, depleted groundwater, disappearing forests, overheated cities and oceans carrying more heat than ever before. We count the roads we build, the homes we construct and the production we increase. But we rarely count what we lose in the process. The forest that disappears, the groundwater that gets depleted or the air that becomes harder to breathe. According to the World Meteorological Organisation in 2025, ocean heat content reached the highest level in the 66-year. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 423.9 parts per million in 2024 the highest level in at least 800,000 years.
These numbers are alarming. But climate change cannot only be experienced as a number. It is experienced as a summer that becomes harder to survive. As rain that does not come when it is supposed to or rain that comes all at once. Not only that, sometimes it is the farmer whose crops fail after an erratic season. It is also the family that loses its home in a flood. The worker who cannot work through extreme heat. The child is growing up in air that is unsafe to breathe. Climate change may be measured in degrees and parts per million, but human beings experience it in much more personal ways. For an ordinary person, climate change is not always a global crisis. It is a summer that feels harder to survive, water becoming harder to find, or rain disrupting everyday life. This is why climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is an economic issue, a health issue, a social justice issue and most importantly a question of survival.
For millions of people, climate change is not a debate about the future. It is already shaping the present. The World Bank Group estimates that more than 4.5 billion people, over half of the world's population, are at high risk of experiencing extreme weather events, including floods, droughts, cyclones and heatwaves. Of these 2.3 billion are poor, while nearly 400 million live in extreme poverty. It is easy to blame governments and industries, but ordinary people are also part of the system. That is not just a large number. It represents billions of individual lives. So the question is no longer only what we are doing to the planet. The Earth existed for billions of years before human beings arrived. It will almost certainly continue in some form without us. Nature does not need us to survive. We need nature to survive. And that is something we have forgotten in our pursuit of control.