On August 26, a glacier collapse along the Nepal-China border triggered flash floods through the Bhotekoshi-Trishuli river corridor, killing approximately 1,450 people and leaving more than 5,500 missing. Reconstruction costs are estimated at $4.8 billion. One month later, the disaster's second phase — displacement without protection — is fully underway. Karishma Tamang, 26 and pregnant with her second child, has moved through multiple shelters since the floods destroyed her community in Rasuwa District. She started in a covered hall in Bidur Municipality shared by hundreds. She now lives in a leaking tent in Barahachaur with no proper toilet. Her brother and his two children remain missing. Sabita Tamang, 24, who lost her 5-year-old daughter, nephew and niece, bathes in open spaces among strangers because no private facilities exist. These are not edge cases — they are the norm across displacement sites in Nuwakot and Dhading districts. Save the Children Nepal's field assessment identifies the structural problem: temporary shelters were built without planning, lack adequate lighting, have no separate washrooms or private spaces, and allow unrestricted access by unfamiliar people. The organization warns that these conditions directly increase risks of trafficking, violence, exploitation and child marriage. Director Ayush Joshi noted that family separations have left older siblings as de facto caregivers for younger children, and that mental health impacts among children — anger, fear, persistent crying — are widespread. At least 541 children have lost parents or become separated from families, per UNICEF. Learning has been disrupted for more than 14,000 children across 62 schools. The government response is real but reactive. Chakra Bahadur Budha, spokesperson at the Ministry of Women, Children, Gender and Sexual Minorities, said monitoring has been increased, entry and exit points are under surveillance, and awareness campaigns about gender-based violence and trafficking are running. Authorities retrieved 78 children from two Buddhist monasteries in Kathmandu that had taken them in outside legal procedures. Adoption has been discouraged; placement with verified close relatives is the current policy. The gap between response and need is the story. More than 80,000 people are affected. Thousands who lost everything live in emergency shelters. While some families have moved into rented rooms, hundreds remain in makeshift tents with no timeline for permanent housing. The $4.8 billion reconstruction estimate dwarfs Nepal's fiscal capacity, making long-term international support not aspirational but existential. None of the seven people who spoke to DW reported experiencing sexual harassment or abuse, but their accounts describe conditions in which such outcomes are structurally probable. The protection architecture for displaced populations — lighting, private sanitation, restricted shelter access, psychosocial support, education continuity — is not novel knowledge. International humanitarian standards have codified these requirements for decades. What Nepal's floods expose is the distance between codified standards and actual deployment capacity in a low-income Himalayan nation facing accelerating climate-driven disasters. Every year that gap persists, the same vulnerabilities replay with different flood dates. The honest framing is this: climate-driven glacial collapse is not a one-off event for Nepal. The protection failures documented here are not failures of awareness — they are failures of investment, infrastructure and institutional capacity that compound with each disaster cycle.
