Changing weather patterns threaten time-tested houses in Nepal village

MUSTANG, Nepal — Sudip Thakali now plans to change the roof of his family house from mud to blended cement concrete (BCC) to avoid water leakage during the rains.

This is not the first time the 37-year-old is trying to make his ancestral home in the Trans-Himalayan village of Thini in Mustang district livable while preserving the traditional essence of the house. Three years ago, he plastered the outer layer of the walls up to 1.2 meters (4 feet) from the ground with thin layers of cement concrete to prevent rainwater from seeping into the mud-gravel mixed walls.

“The wall seems to be doing fine because of the cemented outer layer, but water leakage from the roof is becoming a headache now,” Sudip said. “It rained for more than 48 hours [in the last week of October] and the roof was leaking. I am thinking about replacing it with a very thin BCC ceiling.”

In Nepal’s Trans-Himalayan region, houses have traditionally been built using locally available materials such as clay, mud, sand, gravel, stone and wood. These houses are renowned for their natural insulation properties.

However, changing weather patterns and intense rainfall, whether over short periods or continuously for days as happened in late October, have created new problems, including water seepage through roofs and the weakening of mud-stone walls, forcing local communities to consider alternatives to their traditional housing. Concrete-based houses are gaining ground, but they are more expensive.

Sabi Thakali, a local farmer and small hotel owner from the same village, built a cement house in 2019 to avoid possible disasters caused by the changing rainfall patterns. “But this house is not suitable in winters because it’s too cold,” he said, comparing it to the traditional home where his family used to live.

“The mud house was warm in the winter and cool in the summer; there was no need for electric cooling,” Sabi said. He said he spent around 7 million Nepali rupees ($49,000) to build his house. For residents here, building a new house is not easy or financially feasible. In today’s market, “even constructing a new mud house would cost around 3.5 million rupees [$24,400],” Sabi said.

Meanwhile, local people like Sudip, a civil engineer by profession, are trying to find ways to preserve traditional housing structures while preventing houses from crumbling. “It wasn’t like this before. We used to have rainfall, but the intensity was mild. Now, it has become much heavier,” he said. “We’re forced to find alternatives to our traditional houses — but I am trying to find a creative and cost-effective way, which includes having cement plaster up to 4 feet from the base on the outer layer of walls.” This helps to keep traditional features of the house, he said.

To modify his house with an outer layer of cemented walls, Sudip spent around 30,000 rupees ($210). “Cement was a little expensive because we had to bring it from Pokhara, and transportation cost was high,” he said.

Thini village still has mud houses that were built nearly 200 years ago. The house Sudip lives in was constructed more than 100 years ago. “These houses have everything needed — from food and grain storage to space for livestock,” he said. “Concrete houses are not designed to accommodate all those needs.”

The local government is aware of the increasing risks to mud houses caused by changing weather patterns. However, there are no dedicated efforts to support residents in finding adaptive solutions. “We are seeing water leakage from roofs and crumbling walls, but at the municipality level we don’t yet have any specific program,” said Pradip Thakali, ward chairperson of Gharpajhong Rural Municipality-5.“But we do need to save these historical structures. As a ward chairperson, I am trying to bring this issue to attention.”

Is climate change to blame?

As weather patterns continue to shift, areas where heavy rainfallswere once rare are now experiencing them more frequently. This is affecting traditional homes and altering the way of life in these Himalayan communities. Experts say that traditional houses in high mountain villages like Thini are bearing the brunt of climate change-induced weather events.

Mark S. Aldenderfer, an American anthropologist and archaeologist who has conducted extensive research in the Nepali mountain region including Mustang, said that with increasingly severe anthropogenic climate warming, rainfall and snowfall patterns are changing. “Before warming became so severe, snowfall was moderate and mostly occurred from November to February,” he told Mongabay. “Now we see snowfall, very heavy at times, in October and into March and even April.”

Almost all mudbrick houses in mountain villages have flat roofs adapted to moderate snowfall. If too much snow falls, regardless of the season, the roofs can collapse. “This can happen with climate warming because the weight of the snow is greater than usual,” said Aldenderfer, who is also a professor emeritus of Anthropology and Heritage Studies at the University of California, U.S.

In high mountain regions such as Mustang, precipitation primarily comes as snow. Due to warming, however, precipitation increasingly falls as rain, which can be very intense — sometimes in the form of “rain bombs,” where a month’s worth of rain falls in one or two hours. “Rain bombs are even worse because the flat roofs cannot cope with hard and extensive rainfall. The weight of the rain is simply too much for clay-and-wood roof construction,” Aldenderfer said.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment report says that, in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, “total and extreme precipitation has increased overall over the last five decades, and intense precipitation has changed markedly since 1961.” Heavy rain can erode the base of house walls. Excessive water can infiltrate the foundation and lead to collapse. This is what residents of villages like Thini say they have been experiencing in recent years.

Local solutions, such as cement plastering on walls from the base up to 1 to 1.2 meters (3 or 4 feet), appear to be working — at least in Sudip Thakali’s experience. Other community members are also adopting this technique. “These few years of experience with wall plastering gave me hope. I am hoping to do something similar with the roof. I don’t want to lose this house,” Sudip said.

Cover image : A cluster of houses built using traditional construction materials in Mustang, Nepal. Image by Abhaya Raj Joshi.

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Credits

Abhaya Raj Joshi Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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