The Himalayas are melting faster - and India's economy is 'at risk'

The Himalayas are approaching a dangerous threshold as glaciers melt faster, glacial lakes grow more unstable and the mountains face a widening gap in monitoring, according to new research.

The findings come in the aftermath of devastating floods in Nepal and Tibet, which killed more than 1,300 people and caused widespread destruction, highlighting the growing risks from a rapidly changing Himalayan environment.

Himalayan glaciers are now losing mass 65% faster than they were a decade ago, the report by global consultancy Systemiq, produced with the Integrated Mountain Initiative and with technical contributions from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and GB Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment, says.

Yet only about 21 of the estimated 40,000 glaciers across the Himalaya-Karakoram region are being monitored in detail and on a sustained basis, according to the report.

That monitoring gap matters because the physical landscape is changing rapidly.

As glaciers retreat, they can leave behind expanding lakes held back by unstable deposits of rock and ice. At the same time, warming is destabilising permafrost - permanently frozen ground that can thaw as temperatures rise - and high mountain slopes, increasing the possibility of cascading hazards, the report says.

India already has evidence of the scale of the risk.

Some 18% of Indian land is Himalayan, yet the region accounts for about 35% of disasters, according to the report.

The government told parliament in July that 56 glacial lakes had been classified as "very high risk", external following a 2025 scientific assessment of 189 high-risk lakes in the Indian Himalayan region. The Central Water Commission is monitoring 2,485 glacial lakes larger than 10 hectares across India's Himalayan river basins, the government said.

The Himalayas have already seen devastating examples of what can happen when glacial lakes burst their natural dams.

In 2023, a glacial lake outburst flood in Sikkim killed at least 70 people and caused widespread damage to roads, bridges and hydropower projects. In 2021, a similar disaster in Uttarakhand killed more than 200 people after a massive flood swept through the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga valleys.

But the danger is not confined to spectacular floods.

The Himalayas are a vast natural water system feeding rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people across South Asia. ICIMOD says "peak water", external is expected around mid-century in most Hindu Kush Himalayan river basins - the point at which glacier runoff reaches its maximum before declining as glaciers lose mass.

The new research puts an unusually large economic number on that dependency.

It estimates that Himalayan water underpins roughly 20% of India's GDP, sustaining wheat, rice, tea, hydropower and pilgrimage economies. Yet the mountain states capture only about 5% of that value, it says.

"The Himalayas are the Third Pole," said economist Lord Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "Unlike the Arctic or Antarctic, this pole has hundreds of millions of people living beneath it."

"This is national and international infrastructure," he said, warning that the ecological system underpinning it is "approaching a tipping point".

Not all the forces driving glacier loss are beyond the region's control.

The Systemiq research estimates that roughly a third of Himalayan glacier melt is driven by black carbon, much of it originating from brick kilns in the plains. Soot deposited on snow and ice absorbs more sunlight and accelerates melting.

Unlike global greenhouse-gas emissions, black-carbon pollution is a lever that India and its neighbours can act on directly, the report argues.

"The Himalayas are approaching a tipping point, with millions of lives and livelihoods hanging in the balance," said Arushi Chopra, Systemiq's senior director and lead author. "Glaciers are melting faster than they were a decade ago."

The report proposes 10 priority transitions, ranging from reducing black-carbon emissions and expanding glacier monitoring to improving disaster early-warning systems and changing the way tourism is developed in the mountains.

One priority is to strengthen disaster preparedness, with governments agreeing in advance what action to take when hazards emerge - from evacuation to protecting vulnerable infrastructure.

Another is to rethink tourism. The Indian Himalayan region receives roughly 400 million tourist visits a year, according to the report, and researchers argue that the objective should shift from maximising visitor numbers towards generating value that is retained and reinvested locally.

Pema Gyamtsho, director general of ICIMOD, said the risks were becoming increasingly complex.

"Glaciers are retreating, permafrost and high-mountain slopes are becoming increasingly unstable, and communities and infrastructure downstream face growing risks from complex and cascading hazards," he said.

And those risks do not stop at the borders drawn across the Himalayas. Such hazards, Gyamtsho said, "do not respect national borders, and no single country can address them alone".

That makes cross-border monitoring, shared risk information and early-warning systems, and joint investment in resilience increasingly urgent - not just to save lives, but to protect the livelihoods and economies of hundreds of millions of people who depend on the mountains.