KATHMANDU, Nepal — Floods that damaged hydropower dams in Nepal and destroyed the main bridge connecting the country to China show the vulnerability of infrastructure and the need for smart reconstruction in a region bearing the brunt of climate change, experts say.

On July 8, Bhotekoshi River floodwaters killed nine people and damaged an inland container depot that was being built to support increasing trade between the two countries. The 10 damaged hydropower facilities, including three under construction, combined have capacity to power 600,000 homes.

Another smaller flood in the area on July 30 damaged roads and structures but caused less overall destruction. Elsewhere in the Himalayas, flash floods swept away roads, homes and hotels in northern India on Tuesday, killing at least four people and leaving many others trapped under debris, officials said.

The Himalayan region, which crosses Nepal and several nearby countries including India, is especially vulnerable to heavy rains, floods and landslides because the area is warming faster than the rest of the world due to human-caused climate change. Climate experts say the increasing frequency of extreme weather has changed the playbook for assessing infrastructure risks while also increasing the need for smart rebuilding plans.

“The statistics of the past no longer apply for the future,” said John Pomeroy, a hydrologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “The risk that goes into building a bridge or other infrastructure is generally based on historical observations of past risk, but this is no longer useful because future risk is different and often much higher.”

While damage estimates from the July floods in the Rasuwa region are still being calculated, past construction costs give a sense of the financial toll. The Sino-Nepal Friendship Bridge, for example, cost $68 million to rebuild after it was destroyed by a 2015 earthquake that ravaged Nepal.

The latest disaster has also stoked fears of long-lasting economic damage in a region north of the capital city, Kathmandu, where reconstruction took place for years after the 2015 quake. Nepali government officials estimate that $724 million worth of annual trade with China took place over the bridge, and that has come to a standstill.

“Thank God there wasn’t much damage to local villages, but the container depot and bridges have been completely destroyed,” said Kaami Tsering, a local government official, in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “This has severely affected workers, hotel operators, laborers, and truck drivers who rely on cross-border trade for their livelihoods.”

Among those affected is Urken Tamang, a 50-year-old parking attendant at the depot who has been out of work for several weeks. A small tea shop he runs nearby with his family has also suffered.

“We’ve been unlucky,” said Tamang, a former farmer who sold his land and changed jobs when work on the depot began. “The whole area was severely damaged by the 2015 earthquake, and just when life was slowly returning to normal, this devastating flood struck.”

The Nepal floods are the latest in a series of disasters in South Asia during this year’s monsoon season. Research has shown that extreme weather in the region has contributed to more heat waves, heavy rains and melting glaciers.

Climate experts said smart planning and rebuilding in climate-vulnerable regions must include accounting for multiple risks. This includes installing early warning systems, preparing local communities for disasters and, when needed, relocating infrastructure.

“What we have to avoid is the insanity of rebuilding after a natural disaster in the same place where it occurred and where we know it will occur again at even higher probability,” said Pomeroy, the Canadian hydrologist. “That’s a very poor decision. Unfortunately, that’s what most countries do.”

Before rebuilding in Rasuwa, Nepal government officials need to assess overall risks, including those due to extreme weather and climate change, said Bipin Dulal, an analyst at Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development.

The bridge connecting the two countries was rebuilt to better withstand earthquakes after the one in 2015, but it appears that officials didn’t properly account for the risk of flooding as intense as what occurred in early July, Dulal said.

“We have to see what the extreme risk scenarios can be and we should rebuild in a way in which the infrastructure can handle those extremes,” Dulal said.

Large building projects in South Asia typically receive environmental impact assessments that don’t adequately factor in the risks of floods and other disasters, Dulal said. The center is developing a multi-hazard risk assessment framework that it hopes will be adopted by planners and builders in the region to better account for the dangers of extreme weather.

In 2024 alone, Asia experienced 167 disasters — including storms, floods, heat waves and earthquakes. That was the most of any continent, according to the Emergency 91��Ƶ Database maintained by the University of Louvain, Belgium. These led to losses exceeding $32 billion, the researchers found.

“These disasters are all wake-up calls,” said Ramesh Subramaniam, global director of programs and strategy at the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure. “These risks are real.”

A CDRI analysis found that $124 billion worth of Nepal’s infrastructure is vulnerable to the impacts of climate-driven disasters, creating the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses if the country doesn’t invest in resiliency.

“Investing a relatively smaller figure now would prevent the loss of these enormous sums of damages,” Subramaniam said.

Most climate investments are directed to mitigation, such as building clean energy projects and trying to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being released, Subramaniam said. But given extreme weather damage already occurring, adaptation to climate change is equally important, he said.

“I think countries are learning and adaptation is becoming a standard feature in their annual planning,” he said.

Global efforts to prepare for such losses and recovery include a climate loss and damage fund set up by the United Nations in 2023. Currently, the fund has $348 million, which the U.N. warns is only a fraction of the annual economic damage related to human-caused climate change. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank have also provided loans or grants to build climate-resilient projects.

In Nepal’s recently flood-ravaged region, Tsering, the local government official, said the repeated disasters have exacted more than a financial toll on residents.

“Even though the river has now returned to a normal flow, the fear remains,” he said. “People will always worry that something like this could happen again.”

Editor’s note: Arasu reported from Bengaluru, India

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GALENA, Alaska — Eric Huntington built his dream cabin nestled in the wilderness of central Alaska, eventually raising two daughters there. But over the years, he learned that living in this quiet, remote village came with a hefty cost.

Every year, the Huntington family spent about $7,000 on diesel to heat the cabin during bone-chilling winters. And a few years back, a power outage at the town’s diesel plant left residents temporarily freezing in minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. When power finally returned hours later, water pipes had frozen, leaving about two dozen homes without running water for days.

“We just didn’t open our door all morning until the lights came back on,” said Huntington, a member of the local Louden Tribe.

In Galena, a sprawling village of 400 people on the banks of the Yukon River, a community built around a former military base is shifting to clean energy to reduce its reliance on expensive, imported diesel. Local leaders say their nearly completed solar farm, along with an existing biomass plant, will boost the town’s savings and protect residents from blackouts during extreme weather. The facilities have the potential to provide clean backup power in emergencies and improve the power grid’s resiliency, all while diversifying the village’s energy sources and providing job opportunities for locals.

The projects come at a precarious time for renewable energy transition in the United States. The Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars of clean energy grants to bolster fossil fuel production, and billions of dollars more in investments have been scrapped or delayed this year. So far, the village’s federal grants for the solar array haven’t been impacted, but local leaders know the risk remains. Whatever the future of public funding, the village is an example of how renewable energies can save costs, boost reliability during extreme weather and create jobs.

Once online, the solar array will ensure that the village’s power grid has a backup system, said Tim Kalke, general manager of Sustainable Energy for Galena Alaska — or SEGA — a nonprofit that will operate it. Then a power outage won’t result in tens of thousands of dollars in repairs, he added, and heat will be guaranteed in times of extreme cold.

“You’re dealing with life, health and safety,” he said.

In May, dozens of high school students in navy blue caps and gowns stood with nervous excitement in a locker-brimmed hallway, each waiting their turn to walk through yellow tinsel into a packed auditorium. It was graduation day for Galena Interior Learning Academy.

The school’s vocational training courses and cultural offerings attract some 200 students annually from across Alaska, boosting the village’s population and energy needs.

Students here can take classes on sustainable energy, aviation, carpentry and much more. But to keep the school running — especially during long, cold winters — it needs heat.

That’s where the biomass project comes in. Every winter since 2016, trees (mostly paper birch) are locally harvested and shredded into wood chips that fuel a large boiler plant on campus, offsetting use of about 100,000 gallons of diesel annually for the school district and the city, said Brad Scotton, a Galena City Council member who also serves on SEGA’s board. It’s notable as one of the state’s first large-scale biomass plants and the most rural, he added.

Cost savings from use of biomass has allowed the Galena City School District to hire certified professionals in trade jobs and do upkeep on campus facilities, district superintendent Jason R. Johnson stated in an email.

It’s also created a local workforce, and a job base the village never used to have.

“It’s keeping the money that used to go outside within the community and providing pretty meaningful jobs for people,” Scotton said.

In rural areas of Alaska, the costs for many goods can be high, as they must be brought in. Galena burns just under 400,000 gallons of diesel annually to produce electricity, and an energy price hike around 2008 helped the village realize something needed to change. Scotton remembered when a gallon of diesel was $1.64 and then skyrocketed to $4.58 another year. At that wholesale price, the city was paying more than $1.8 million to keep the lights on.

“It was really quite a shock to everybody’s system in terms of trying to operate with those elevated costs,” Scotton said. “So that really got the community assessing whether or not we could continue business as usual with that reliance.”

That’s when they started looking for grants to build a solar array.

On an overcast May day, on a field flanked by boreal forests, workers in reflective safety vests slotted rectangular panels onto a metal grid. They were working on the nearly completed, 1.5-megawatt solar farm that will connect to a battery system.

The community will eventually be able to turn off its diesel engines and run on 100 percent clean, renewable energy on sunny summer days. Any excess power will be stored for nights, emergencies or heating the local indoor pool. The solar array will allow diesel operations to be shut off between 800 to 1,000 hours per year, saving about 100,000 gallons.

The solar farm won’t necessarily lower people’s electricity bills. But like the biomass plant, the hope is that it will stabilize energy costs, allowing those savings to go back into the community, all while providing work opportunities for residents like Aaren Sommer. Last year, the 19-year-old graduated from the academy, where he learned about solar energy. Now he’s helping to install the solar array.

“That’s going to reduce the diesel usage a whole bunch over at the power plant, which is going to help us out,” he said.

Editor’s note: Pineda reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press journalist Alyssa Goodman in New York contributed to this report.

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BENGALURU, India — An innovative portable shelter recently exhibited in one of India’s largest cities shows how smart, cheap ways to help workers escape the heat are gaining traction in a country that’s particularly vulnerable to extreme temperatures.

The Neralu shelter, winner of a design contest in the southern city of Bengaluru, was displayed at the Sweat and Concrete 2025 event in late May alongside a theatrical performance about heat impacts on outdoor workers and exhibits on heat-related studies. Organizer Kanishk Kabiraj said the aim of the exhibition is to raise awareness about how extreme heat is endangering the health and livelihoods of the country’s outdoor workforce. It comes amid a shift in India toward greater awareness of climate-related issues in recent years.

“We think that it’s important to not only talk conceptually but to try and create models and proof of concept,” Kabiraj said.

Neralu, which means shade in Kannada, the most common local language spoken in Bengaluru, consists of a lightweight frame that supports a shade, bench and angled slats operated by manual pulleys to fan people seated within. The shelter costs about $175 and is made of metal, fiber-reinforced plastic and plywood. Weighing roughly 33 pounds, the shelter for up to four people can be installed on outdoor walls and easily disassembled and transported on the small motor vehicles known as tuk-tuks.

“This kind of shelter will be helpful for people like us who work outdoors,” said Madhe Gowda, a 62-year-old fruit seller who viewed the exhibit. “I sell fruits from my pushcart all day. When it’s really hot, my fruits begin to rot, and it becomes difficult for me to move around much.”

Neralu beat 19 other entries in a contest for designing heat shelters for outdoor workers organized in Bengaluru last year. Ankritya Diggavi, one of the architects behind the design, said it was inspired by speaking to and observing outdoor workers.

“They have made their own makeshift measures using material like beach umbrellas and tarpaulin sheets,” Diggavi said.

The designers said the Neralu shelter can be made of recycled and repurposed material from the auto industry or other businesses. They said the design has a lot of room for modification, to account for local needs and available materials.

“We wanted something simple, affordable, and quick to assemble,” said Sagar Kandal, another Neralu designer.

They said they have received interest from both public and private organizations that want to purchase and install these shelters in the city. The Indian Meteorological Department has found the number of extreme heat days increasing in the city, and planning experts say it’s likely due to climate change and rapid urbanization.

And with a rising number of Indian states designing heat and climate change adaptation plans, Neralu designers said the shelter can work in any heat-stressed city that needs low-cost solutions.

Tamanna Dalal, a researcher on heat policy at the New Delhi-based think tank Sustainable Futures Collaborative, said the way cities are built in India is resulting in urban heat islands — parts of cities with higher average temperatures than the surrounding areas. Shelters that take local climate factors into account and can be replicated easily will become “supremely important” as heat worsens in the coming years, Dalal added.

India is among the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate impacts, with floods, heat waves and cyclones having resulted in 80,000 deaths and economic losses nearing $180 billion from 1993 to 2022. According to the International Labor Organization, India stands to lose up to 34 million jobs due to increasing heat by 2030.

P. Kumaravel, a 42-year-old construction worker who was at the Sweat and Concrete 2025 event held over two days, welcomed the idea of the shelter, but said good public transport and reliable health insurance are what workers like him need the most.

“This year’s heat was really bad,” he said. “I had rashes and pimples. We rest under a tree when we can, but we’re paid to work, not to rest. A shelter is helpful, but it’s not enough.”

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NEW ORLEANS — The textile mills that once served as the backbone of Mount Pleasant, North Carolina, were shuttered long ago, and officials believed federal money would be key to the town’s overdue revitalization. They hoped an improved stormwater drainage system and secured electrical wires — funded through a program to help communities protect against natural disasters and climate change — would safeguard investments in new businesses like a renovated historic theater to spur the largely rural economy.

Mount Pleasant was about to receive $4 million when the Federal Emergency Management Agency eliminated the program. City officials say their plans — years in the making — and those of hundreds of communities nationwide supported by the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program have been upended.

“This is a generational set of infrastructure projects that would set us up for the next hundred years and it just — poof — went away,” said Erin Burris, assistant town manager for Mount Pleasant, 25 miles east of Charlotte.

FEMA’s elimination this month of the BRIC program revoked upwards of $3.6 billion in funding earmarked for communities like Mount Pleasant. Though President Donald Trump has openly questioned whether to shutter FEMA completely, local officials said they were blindsided by the move to end BRIC, which was established during the Republican’s first term.

Many affected communities are in Republican-dominated, disaster-prone regions. FEMA called the BRIC grants “wasteful” and “politicized” tools, but officials and residents say they were a vital use of government resources to proactively protect lives, infrastructure and economies. Money would have gone toward strengthening electrical poles to withstand hurricane-force winds in Louisiana, relocating residents in Pennsylvania’s floodplains and safeguarding water supply lines in Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley.

Disasters affect most Americans — 95 percent live in a county that since 2011 has had a federally declared weather disaster, said Amy Chester, director of Rebuild by Design, a nonprofit focused on disaster prevention.

BRIC program administrators told communities, “We’re going to help your community be stronger ahead of time,” she said. “Cutting one of the sole sources of funding for that need is essentially telling Americans that it’s OK that they’re suffering.”

Across multiple states, officials said the BRIC program was far from perfect — they were often frustrated with the wait for funding.

But in southeastern Louisiana, Lafourche Parish President Archie Chaisson said despite his issues with FEMA’s bureaucracy, he’s seen firsthand that money invested to fortify homes and infrastructure works.

The hurricane-ravaged state receives the highest rate of federal disaster assistance per capita, with more than $8 billion pouring in since 2011, according to Rebuild by Design. Lafourche Parish has seen more than a dozen federally declared extreme weather disasters since 2011.

Lafourche had been set to receive more than $20 million from several grants to replace wooden electrical poles with steel ones and take other steps to lower the soaring costs of home insurance.

Chaisson, a Republican whose parish saw 80 percent of voters support Trump in November, said he backs efforts to streamline federal agencies — as long as funding continues to flow for disaster prevention.

“I’m hopeful that that’s what the president’s trying to do with this,” he said. “Is there some other way to get the money so we can continue to do these projects? … No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, the programs themselves and the dollars allocated make our communities more resilient.”

Research backs him up: A 2024 study funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found every $1 invested in disaster preparation saved $13 in economic impact, damage and cleanup costs.

Democratic officials in states that lost money have publicly expressed outrage. Few Republicans have joined in at a national level, even though about two-thirds of the top 15 states in total FEMA funds received, spending per person and number of federally declared disasters lean heavily Republican.

An exception has been Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator, Bill Cassidy. He took to the Senate floor this month calling for BRIC’s reinstatement, saying it’s “a lifesaver and a cost-saver.”

About $185 million intended for Louisiana evaporated, and officials had to shelve dozens of applications for hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding, according to data compiled by state and federal agencies.

“This isn’t waste,” Cassidy said. “To do anything other than use that money to fund flood mitigation projects is to thwart the will of Congress.”

More than $3.6 billion of BRIC funds will be returned to the federal Disaster Relief Fund for disaster response and recovery, and $882 million more will be returned to the U.S. Treasury or reapportioned by Congress in the following fiscal year, FEMA said. Agency officials did not comment further for this story.

Twenty-two mostly blue states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit demanding the federal government release obligated funding, including FEMA grants.

The lawsuit highlights Grants Pass in conservative southern Oregon, where FEMA has refused to release BRIC funding awarded for a $50 million water treatment facility.

Flooding could knock out the water supply for 60,000 people for months, said Jason Canady, city public works director. Funding would have been used in part to build a modernized plant on higher ground.

“If you can’t provide drinking water, hospitals, groceries, restaurants are going to have trouble,” he said. “Economically, it would be devastating. It really is the cornerstone on which the community is built.”

In Stillwater, Oklahoma, Mayor Will Joyce spent two years working with FEMA on a BRIC application to overhaul and provide backup supply for a regional water system used by 100,000 people. Its 36-mile-long pipeline is at risk of damage from tornadoes and flooding. If it breaks, Stillwater has less than a day’s worth of reserve drinking water.

“We can’t just hope nothing bad happens,” Joyce said. “This project is a necessity.”

Without FEMA’s support, he said, Stillwater will have to double the cost of water for residents to fund the project.

U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan Jr., a northeast Pennsylvania Republican, in an open letter urged FEMA to revive BRIC, saying communities in his district would struggle to fund disaster adaptation work, including relocating families in flooded homes.

Bresnahan wrote that “programs like BRIC are not wasteful, but well within the purview of federal coordination of disaster relief efforts” and noted that Trump “promised not to leave the forgotten men and women of America behind.”

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