Informant: Nah. What can we do? Our houses are there so we cannot just leave everything and go to another place as we do not own land in other place! So even if we have to die, we will live and die in our own house; that is what we think.

In recent decades, landslide disasters in the Himalayas, as in other mountain regions, are widely reported to have increased. While some studies have suggested a link to increasing heavy rainfall under a warmer climate, others pointed to anthropogenic influences on slope stability, and increasing exposure of people and assets located in harm’s way. A lack of sufficiently high-resolution regional landslide inventories, both spatially and temporally, has prevented any robust consensus so far. Focusing on Far-Western Nepal, we draw on remote sensing techniques to create a regional inventory of 26,350 single landslide events, of which 8778 date to the period 1992–2018. These events serve as a basis for the analyses of landslide frequency relationships and trends in relation to precipitation and temperature datasets. Results show a strong correlation between the annual number of shallow landslides and the accumulated monsoon precipitation (r = 0.74). Furthermore, warm and dry monsoons followed by especially rainy monsoons produce the highest incidence of shallow landslides (r = 0.77). However, we find strong spatial variability in the strength of these relationships, which is linked to recent demographic development in the region. This highlights the role of anthropogenic drivers, and in particular road cutting and land-use change, in amplifying the seasonal monsoon influence on slope stability. In parallel, the absence of any long-term trends in landslide activity, despite widely reported increase in landslide disasters, points strongly to increasing exposure of people and infrastructure as the main driver of landslide disasters in this region of Nepal. By contrast, no climate change signal is evident from the data.

The interactive roles of the natural factors that contribute to landslide initiation and potential climate changes are complex. Additional complexity is added when changing forest land uses are considered. Thus, while it is impossible to ascertain specific patterns of landslide response to possible climate change, certain generalizations can be made and scenarios can be discussed. Shallow, rapid landslides will only increase in scenarios of increasing rain event intensity, whereas, deep-seated mass movements will increase with seasonal increases in precipitation. Dry ravel may respond more directly to warming, increasing with sparse vegetation covers and increased frequency of fire. Climate change has the greatest impacts on landslide occurrence by modifying evapotranspiration and root strength of vegetation. Evapotranspiration affects soil water recharge and subsurface flow and thus influences slope stability. Climate change may alter canopy structure, soil runoff and evaporation, ground cover, and rooting depth; these in turn affect water storage and routing in unstable sites. Anthropogenic and climate-induced changes in vegetation cover particularly affect the potential for shallow landsliding due to modifications in root cohesion. While much attention has been placed on the impacts of forest harvesting practices on increased landslide erosion, the effects of permanent forest land conversion, particularly in the tropics, appear more problematic. Additionally, the increasing impacts of affluent recreation in the developing world need to be assessed. Agroforestry may offer some socioeconomic and natural resource advantages in selected cases, but cumulative off-site effects must be evaluated. Depending on the level of detail required and type of available data, landslide hazard can be assessed by several methods: (i) terrain stability classification; (ii) empirical landslide hazard assessment; and (iii) physically-based models. Including climatic change scenarios into landslide hazard models is a complex task because scenarios of climatic change are unclear even at regional levels. Also, most models only evaluate land use in a very general way. Thus, much progress is needed to predict these interactive climate-change and anthropogenic impacts on slope stability.

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To compare the efficacy of treatment between steroid-antibiotic and 10% Ichthammol glycerine packs (IG packs) in acute otitis externa. A prospective, randomized clinical trial between steroid-antibiotic and 10% IG pack which was performed in department of ENT-HNS, Kathmandu University Hospital, Dhulikhel from July 2009 to December 2009 on 82 patients. Pain was assessed by Numerical Rating Scale (NRS) and edema was assessed by dividing the external auditory canal in four quadrant giving score of 25% for each on the day of presentation and subsequent visits till tragal tenderness and edema subsided. Age group among studied patients ranged from 10 to 60 years, with mean of 23.5 years. Out of which 42 (51.2%) were females and 40 (48.8%) were males. Average number of visits in 10% IG pack group (n = 41) was 5.4 days (2-5 visits) while in steroid-antibiotic group (n = 41) it was 3.5 days (2-5 visits). There was statistically significant decrease in the number of visits in steroid group (P < 0.05). Similarly, decrease in pain score in second visit was statistically significant (P = 0.02) in steroid-antibiotic group as compared to 10% IG pack, while the edema score in second visit while comparing steroid-antibiotic group with 10% IG pack was statistically not significant (P = 0.07), whereas it was statistically highly significant on fourth visit (P = 0.001). Since the control of pain and edema is more and hence the number of visits is significantly less in steroid-antibiotic packing group, so it is worthwhile to use steroid-antibiotic pack for effective treatment of acute otitis externa.