UCF scholars from Nepal are leveraging their firsthand experiences with natural disasters to inform their research and help educate students in Orlando. This package aired in the Sept. 25 newscast. Anchored by Sabrina Hansen.
Claire Macchiarola
Dr. Suman Acharya was driving to campus and listening to the news when he learned that deadly flash floods had hit his home country, Nepal.
Because of the disaster in August 2026, he said friends working in an impacted national park are missing.
These floods weren’t the first environmental catastrophe in Nepal to hit close to home for Acharya. In 2015, a major earthquake hit Nepal while he was on the third floor of his house near the country’s capital city, he said.
“That was the craziest experience I ever had in my life,” Acharya said. “I was feeling like dancing for a couple of minutes or so, and then I rushed down.”
He said his family survived the disaster, but watching disasters unfold in his country pushed him to pursue an education studying environmental policy. He is now an assistant professor at UCF in the School of Politics, Security and International Affairs.
Bikash Adhikari, a fifth-year doctoral student in UCF’s public affairs program, was an engineering student in western Nepal when the 2015 earthquake ravaged the country. He said his family members lost their homes and friends went missing. He decided to involve himself in the chaotic recovery efforts.
Adhikari said witnessing his community band together gave him hope, but it made him perceive existing gaps in housing infrastructure and emergency systems.
“People living there can’t just rebuild,” Adhikari said. “They have to resettle somewhere else and completely leave their hometowns.”
Now researching emergency management and organizational behavior, Adhikari looks at the current floods through an analytical yet painful lens. A night owl, he discovered the flood news late at night on his phone, only to realize that three of his former engineering classmates deployed to a regional hydropower project were among the missing.
“I was in contact with them like three months before,” Adhikari said. “Still now we don’t know about their situation, and I think families are now losing hope that they will be returning safe and sound.”
While Adhikari works to finish his doctorate and bring his emergency management skills back to Nepal after graduation, being away from home remains difficult for the time being.
“During recent disaster events, I am missing Nepal more than ever. I miss Nepal every day, on every occasion,” Adhikari said.
Dr. Sanam Aksha, an assistant professor in the School of Public Administration, is also from Nepal. Last month’s flood hit his home village Tupche, with friends missing too.
When he initially found out about the disaster through social media, he told News 13 that he was “completely heartbroken.”
“The first week was really hard,” Aksha said. “And then slowly, I try to distract myself with teaching, for the class, so that I’m not doomscrolling my social media feed.”
Aksha said that the extent of flooding was unprecedented and something local communities weren’t prepared for. He said the disaster traumatized elderly members of his community, who had to go to the hospital.
“From that day onward, they simply could not sleep,” Aksha said. “They cannot eat because it’s very traumatic.”
Aksha said the initial rescue efforts in response to the disaster have ended. Given the amount of time that has passed, he said there’s “no hope” in finding those still missing.
The priority now, Aksha said, is to house the people who’ve been displaced by the flooding, as the river impacted by the disaster will not recede to the height that it was at before.
Because of the floods, Aksha said local authorities will have to grapple with resettling displaced people without relocating them too far away in order to maintain existing social and kinship networks.
“If we try to resettle them somewhere else, there will be inherent conflict between the communities who are already there versus who are new,” Aksha said.
In rebounding from the disaster, Acharya said landscape recovery is important to pursue.
“It’s not only the houses and these things, but how to rebuild the community, how to rebuild our cultural heritages, how to rebuild the landscape that is gone,” Acharya said.
Aksha said resettling displaced victims of the floods will present long-term challenges. Displaced families who had depended on fertile farmland that’s now buried have lost their main source of income, he said.
“It’s very productive land, three crops per year, so that you can sustain your family,” Aksha said. “Now they have nothing. So can we resettle this? Can we make it fertile again? No.”
With the last month’s floods behind him, Aksha said he’s been “trying to slowly digest” the disaster and “understand that it is what it is.”
“We need to move on because that’s how life is,” Aksha said. “We don’t like it, but we have to move on.”
Aksha said his family members survived the flash flooding, and his niece has been able to go to school again.
Recovery work is still ongoing, with support and aid coming from the Nepalese government and outside communities “lending their hands for the better reconstruction and recovery,” Aksha said.
Aksha said those interested in helping the ongoing recovery efforts can donate to the Prime Minister Disaster Relief Fund.
Acharya said governments must treat this disaster as a warning and heavily invest in Himalayan ecological research.
Today, Acharya channels his lived experience and geographic expertise directly into the courses he teaches. Whether he is teaching research methods, global environmental politics or preparing for his upcoming sustainability class, he uses Nepal as a living lesson.
“Coming from the same background, I feel it way different than other people,” Acharya said. “But now I am teaching to make the new generation understand these events very differently.”