Invited perspectives: Mountain roads in Nepal at a new crossroads

Abstract

Abstract. In Nepal and many developing countries around the world, roads are vehicles for development for communities in rural areas. By reducing travel time on foot, opportunities are opened for quicker transportation of goods and better access to employment, education, health care and markets. Roads also fuel migration and numerous social changes, both positive and negative. Poorly constructed roads in mountainous areas of Nepal have increased erosion and landslide risk as they often cut through fragile geology, destabilizing slopes and altering local hydrological conditions, with costs to lives and livelihoods. The convergence of the newly constituted decentralized Nepali government with China's Belt and Road Initiative is likely to bring more roads to rural communities. The new provincial government administrations now have the opportunity to develop policies and practices, which can realign the current trend of poorly engineered, inefficient and hazardous road construction toward a more sustainable trajectory. This commentary provides an overview of some of the obstacles along the way for a more sustainable road network in Nepal and illustrates how good governance, development and landslide risk are intertwined. The opinion presented in this brief commentary lends little hope that Nepal's current pathway of unsustainable road construction will provide the country with the much-needed sustainable road network, unless checks and balances are put in place to curb noncompliance with existing laws and policies.

Framework for Assessment of Eco-Safe Rural Roads in Panchase Geographic Region in Central–Western Nepal Hills

“…Roads are important infrastructures that bring livelihood opportunities and improve the quality of life. However, unplanned and non-engineered rural roads are the cause of disasters such as landslides [4]. In Nepal, the problem of unplanned and non-engineered rural roads is pervasive, as such roads are often non-operational for 4-6 months during and after the monsoon period (June-November) [4,20].…”

“…However, unplanned and non-engineered rural roads are the cause of disasters such as landslides [4]. In Nepal, the problem of unplanned and non-engineered rural roads is pervasive, as such roads are often non-operational for 4-6 months during and after the monsoon period (June-November) [4,20]. These roads are causal factors for landslides and soil erosion, while intense monsoonal rain is known to be the triggering factor damaging the lives and livelihoods, and degrading the environment and ecosystem services [3].…”

“…Investment in roads is considered to bring multiple opportunities for enhancing livelihoods [2]. However, studies showed that, over the period of about 20 years, haphazard construction of rural roads increased exponentially in Nepal [3,4], and these roads are mostly unplanned and non-engineered [5], resulting in many slope failures that can create catastrophic disasters such as landslides. Unplanned human interventions, such as rural road construction, quarrying or poor terrace management can increase the fragility of slopes and, consequently, the occurrence of landslides and erosion [6].…”

Preface: Landslide–transport network interactions

“…The propensity of steeper topography to landslides (and future climate change affects landslide triggering) amplifies the problem of landslide-transport network interactions, as a network with less redundancy increases the likelihood of isolation in the event of a landslide disruption. Three of the papers in this special issue (McAdoo et al, 2018;Schlögl et al, 2019;Sudmeier-Rieux et al, 2019) address the challenge of mountain transportation networks:…”

“…However, these and similar statistics are likely to underestimate the magnitude of impact and interac-tions between landslides and transportation networks due to (i) under-reporting of landslides and (ii) the potentially large regional implications of a landslide blocking a transportation corridor (e.g. Meyer et al, 2015), under-evaluating the potential impact of road networks on water and sediment flow paths at the catchment scale (Sidle and Ziegler, 2012;Tarolli and Sofia, 2016).…”