The Trump administration cut funds for natural hazards monitoring in Nepal. A year later, disaster struck

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — In January 2025, the Trump administration cut off funding for a long-running natural hazards program that aimed to identify and monitor landslide hotspots in Nepal. Just over a year later, more than 1,100 people perished when a huge glacier and rock landslide high in the Himalayas triggered fast-moving floodwaters that struck Nepal and China.

The disaster illustrates the growing peril of living in mountain regions like the Himalayas as the planet continues to warm due to climate pollution from human activities. Increasing temperatures are destabilizing glaciers, while also raising the risks of landslides, flash flooding and glacial outburst floods. The recent disaster illustrates the peril of living in the region without the benefit of early warning systems for these impending and deadly hazards.

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The program that the administration cut was known as Project SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya. It was aimed at identifying areas prone to landslides and other risks that climate change is making more common, said Birendra Bajracharya, the project’s former director. The funding cut halted efforts to improve “landslide situational awareness” related to extreme rainfall, he said. In addition, “slope motion detection for landslide forecasts could not be completed” either, Bajracharya said.

The SERVIR program probably would not have been able to provide an early warning of the floods that caused so much devastation this month, had it been operating, he said. Glacier breakup events are rare enough that researchers can’t set up alarm bells for when they happen. But the program was working on spotting locations where such events might be likely — something that can help communities downstream be better prepared for the worst.

Some of the data programs that Project SERVIR initiated in Nepal continue to operate, Bajracharya said, including streamflow prediction for major rivers in the region and forest fire monitoring. However, flood inundation mapping is no longer operational.

Bajracharya and outside scientists said monitoring of glaciers, areas prone to landslides and river flooding are urgently needed in this region, and the funding cut suddenly shut down efforts that had been underway since 2010. Pulling funding without advanced notice was particularly disruptive, Bajracharya said, because there was no time to wind down projects or try to pass them on to other organizations.

Project SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya was a joint initiative involving NASA, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development. The Trump administration — partly through the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — dismantled USAID, canceling scores of grants based on keyword searches, including “climate.”

The broader Project SERVIR still operates some programs elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but the projects in Nepal have been shut down, according to information on its website.

A State Department spokesperson told CNN that the January 2025 funding cut came before the USAID reorganization, and that the US still supports flood mitigation programs in Nepal.

Bajracharya, however, said he was told the funding was cut because of changes to US administration priorities on foreign aid and cuts to USAID. “We got the stop work notice around the end of January 2025,” he said. He noted the contract was originally supposed to last through 2026.

The Trump administration froze nearly all foreign assistance worldwide days after President Donald Trump took office and issued a sweeping executive order to put a hold on such aid.

The ongoing support for flood mitigation in Nepal is taking place through a grant to the World Meteorological Organization, the State Department spokesperson said. In addition, they said there is also a work agreement between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology for flood early warning, disaster response training and work to improve forecast data.

According to Marco Tedesco, a geophysicist at Columbia University, the task of developing early warning systems for landslides, glacier collapse events and glacial outburst floods requires sustained effort. He criticized the funding cut for discontinuing critical work along these lines.

“For sure, taking away resources from existing projects is not the way to go,” Tedesco said.

He said while we currently lack the capacity to warn of a disaster like what recently occurred in Nepal and China, it is necessary to try to develop an early warning system because the region is becoming more vulnerable to similar calamities in the future.

“We knew that this could have happened, and we know that it will happen again eventually,” Tedesco said of the deadly glacial collapse. “The area is so exposed to hazards from a geological perspective, but it’s also so densely populated, that even small areas impacted, they are going to be paying a high price.”

“It’s a problem of allocation of resources,” he said. “And it’s a problem of investing to develop the proper technologies.”

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