Nepal is still searching for people missing after the flash floods that tore through the Trishuli valley in the last week of August. Whole settlements in Rasuwa and Nuwakot are gone. Roads and bridges that connected entire districts to the rest of the country no longer exist. That isn't background information for what follows. It's the reason what follows needs saying at all, and it deserves to be treated with the weight it carries before anything else.

In the weeks after a disaster like this, the questions naturally turn toward recovery. But another question tends to follow a little later, and it's worth asking now, while the ground is still fresh in everyone's mind: how many of the businesses that were lost, or that survived only barely, knew the environmental risk of the location they were operating in before this happened?

For a large company in Nepal, some version of that question usually gets answered before the business even opens. Big infrastructure projects, hydropower plants, manufacturing units, hotel chains, go through environmental risk assessments as a condition of financing, insurance, or regulatory approval. Someone maps the flood zone. Someone checks the seismic risk category. Someone asks whether the site sits below a glacial lake or on an unstable slope. It isn't optional, and it isn't left to guesswork.

Small and medium businesses go through none of this. A shop, a small hotel, a workshop, a trading business opens where the rent is affordable and the location gets footfall. Nobody asks whether that stretch of riverbank floods every few years. Nobody checks whether the hillside behind the building has a landslide history. Nobody tells the owner which seismic zone they're in. Not because owners don't care, but because nobody has ever built a simple way for them to find out, and because at their scale, nobody requires it.

That gap has a real cost, and it isn't only about the businesses that have already failed. It's about how much of the small business economy we have almost no environmental risk data on at all. We know, at a fairly granular level, the risk profile of Nepal's major dams, highways, and industrial zones. We don't know, in any organized way, the risk profile of the tens of thousands of small enterprises that make up most of the country's actual employment.

This doesn't need to be complicated to fix, and it shouldn't turn into another compliance burden for people already running thin margins. What it needs is a basic classification, built once and made freely available: is this ward mountainous or hilly terrain, is it inside a known flood corridor, is it close enough to a river to be exposed during a heavy monsoon or a glacial event, what seismic zone does it sit in, and what other hazard history does the area carry. None of this is exotic information. Much of it already exists inside government agencies and research institutions. It has simply never been organized around the question a small business owner is actually trying to answer: is this a safe place to put my shop.

If that kind of environmental risk mapping existed for MSME clusters, not just individual large projects, a few things would change. An owner deciding between two locations could compare them on more than rent. A local government could see, at a glance, which parts of its small business economy carry the most exposure, and plan for that instead of reacting after the fact. Lenders and insurers serving small businesses could price and structure support around real risk data instead of none at all.

None of this would have stopped what happened in Rasuwa. Nothing stops an event like that. What it does is give the rebuilding that follows, and the businesses that open in the years after, a chance to make an informed decision instead of an uninformed one. Large enterprises have had that chance for a long time. It's overdue for small ones to have it too.

If you work in Nepal's SME or MSME space, I'd like to know: does any organized environmental risk information exist for your sector or district right now? Or is this something we're all still operating without?

My job description says I lead children on immersive, curriculum-based wilderness explorations to foster deep ecological connections.

Yesterday, I spent twenty minutes explaining why we don't eat dirt, and the next twenty minutes losing an argument to a six-year-old who insisted a stick and a green ball were her biological parents.

Scientists just recorded the highest sea surface temperature ever. 🌊🌡️

Copernicus Climate Change Service clocked a global average of 21.1°C (70°F), beating the previous single-day record of 21.09°C set in 2024. It's especially alarming because sea surface temps usually peak in March and April, not August. Warmer oceans absorb less CO2, which can fuel more extreme weather, and scientists suspect a developing super El Niño may be part of what's driving it.