Beyond preparedness: Why Nepal must fund road resilience

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First, our engineering standards must evolve. The flood magnitudes adopted by the NRS 2070 assume a 50-year return period for first-class roads and a 100-year for bridges. While a 10 percent increase in design discharge is mandated to account for climate change, DOR's Guidelines on Hydrologic and Hydraulic Analysis and River Training Works for Bridge Design no longer suffices in the face of rapidly shortening return periods.

There should be no delay in increasing the design return period to 100 and 200 years for major roads and bridges, respectively.

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Second, planning must be risk-informed and data-driven. Integrating climate-informed vulnerability mapping to identify at-risk zones before the construction or repair is imperative. This helps to avoid the high-risk zones from the get-go and minimizes the likelihood of recurring future damage.

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And most importantly, resilience cannot rely on concrete alone. Structural adaptations like increased freeboard of bridges and strategic elevation of roadways should be complemented with nature-based and hybrid solutions, vegetative slope stabilization and bioengineering. In Nepal, steep slopes could benefit particularly from hybrid approaches such as vegetative bioengineering combined with check dams. Also, land-use planning, like establishing conservation buffer zones adjacent to floodplains to regulate development, prevents encroachments that heighten flood levels or exacerbate erosion.

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To break free from the disaster and repair loop, Nepal must embed "climate logic" into its development DNA. "Fund Resilience, Not Disasters," the theme from the recent International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, captures this urgency: invest now, or pay exponentially later.