Beijing —
The deadly floods along the China-Nepal border have put a sharp spotlight on how the risk from natural disasters in the Himalayas is increasing, at the same time as countries in the region are rapidly building out their high-altitude infrastructure footprint.
There is no indication that the disaster, which has left more than 600 people dead and about 2,500 missing on both sides of the China-Nepal border, is linked to human development.
But the devastation could be a reality check for the government, which is pushing ahead with a boom in building dams, tunnels, highways, railways and bridges in the Himalayas, aiming to harness the region’s vast hydropower potential and resources and strengthen its borders.
No country is taking more of a lead in these efforts than China, which considers Tibet and its Himalayan border areas critical to national and energy security.
The Chinese government aims to transform the region into a high-altitude green energy powerhouse with projects including a $168 billion mega dam currently under construction that could push the limits of what human engineering has achieved.
And it’s not just China. India, and to a lesser extent Nepal, have gone hard on infrastructure construction in recent years, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into developing areas of the world highly vulnerable to earthquakes, natural disasters, and climate change.
These vulnerabilities were devastatingly exposed on Wednesday morning when a section of the glacier fell off the mountain, triggering a powerful landslide and releasing a torrent of water that engulfed buildings and destroyed villages, roads, bridges and hydropower plants, the total cost of which is still unknown.
The threat of secondary disasters such as floods and landslides from the weir lake formed by the debris has made rescue efforts on both sides risky.
On Friday, a meeting of China’s ruling Communist Party elites led by leader Xi Jinping highlighted the “huge challenges to rescue and emergency response operations” posed by “numerous glaciers, glacial lakes, potential geological hazards” and variable weather conditions.
Despite these signs, it remains an open question whether this disaster will serve as a wake-up call for Himalayan countries with big dreams for infrastructure. Experts say the severity of the situation and its location on the border will require state planners to think more carefully about how to design, locate and scale projects within the region, and should spur regional discussions about shared risk monitoring systems.
Especially since climate change is making natural disasters more extreme and difficult to predict.
“We are experiencing a ‘100-year flood’ every five to 10 years…Climate risks are evolving rapidly beyond our ability to change what we think is the horizon of safety,” said Austin Lord, a senior fellow in the Energy, Water and Sustainability Program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.
“There are so many unknowns that if we don’t work together, we’re not going to make any progress and we’ll just be overwhelmed again next time,” he said.
The landmass of the Himalayas is divided by huge rivers that rise from shifting faults and flow from glaciers. Millions of people living on the floodplains of the Indian subcontinent depend on water flowing downstream.
It’s one of the world’s most ecologically and seismically sensitive regions, but the possibility of harnessing the river for large-scale hydropower projects has long fascinated engineers.
Recent advances in China’s dam-building technology, clean energy electrification and the race to eliminate coal, and the smoldering border dispute between China and India in the highlands are driving change in the region.
“Mountains have been reconfigured from being viewed by[states]as remote areas and potential sites of ethnic instability to being a resource,” said Ruth Gamble, an expert on Tibetan environmental, cultural and climate history at Australia’s La Trobe University.
“This is about hydropower, but it’s also about mineral resources and tourism,” she said, adding, “There’s also a military-industrial complex going on… there’s a lot of infrastructure associated with that.”
The Chinese government is building massive ultra-high-voltage power lines to transport clean energy from Tibet’s hydroelectric power stations and vast solar and wind farms to its energy-hungry east coast. It has also long used development to assert its control over life in Tibetan areas since 1959, after a failed revolt under the 14th Dalai Lama that led to his exile in India.
China’s new mega-dam project on Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo River, which broke ground last July, is one of dozens of hydropower projects across Tibet, according to researchers. The project harnesses a 2,000 meter drop in altitude by blasting a tunnel into the mountain and is expected to generate the most electricity in the world.
China is also building new villages and infrastructure along the disputed border as part of an effort to project power and enable faster mobilization of its military. Chinese and Indian soldiers also engaged in deadly skirmishes along the disputed Himalayan border in 2020.
Meanwhile, India’s largest state-run hydropower company is also pursuing its own high-altitude hydropower megaproject: an 11,200-megawatt dam downstream from China. In recent years, New Delhi has debuted ambitious new tunnels and railways through mountain passes, which could also enable the deployment of military and other resources to the Himalayas.
Meanwhile, Nepal is also building more hydropower along its Himalayan rivers, sometimes with funding from its two largest neighbors who vie for influence.
The demand for electricity that comes with the development of AI could intensify efforts to utilize the region’s rivers and encourage further infrastructure development.
Chinese engineers are widely known as some of the best in the world for their advanced efforts to incorporate mitigation and monitoring.
But still, experts say the realities of construction – blasting rock with dynamite, pouring concrete over natural features and storing water in reservoirs – can have unintended consequences.
Landslides, debris flows, and glacial lake outburst floods are all features of the region that are becoming more unpredictable as the climate changes. It can also endanger nearby people and damage infrastructure if the project cannot accommodate it.
A surge of flooding in Nepal this week destroyed 12 dams, cutting out more than 430 megawatts of electricity, enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Other projects under construction, estimated to account for an additional 470 megawatts of capacity, were also damaged, according to Nepal’s Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation.
As news of Wednesday’s disaster along the border spread, rumors also spread that the incident was the result of a dam failure on the Chinese side of the border. Although the theory is not based in fact, it highlights how such events can fuel mistrust along the region’s borders.
The Chinese Embassy in Nepal responded with a post on X denouncing the accusations and calling them “fake news” for not issuing a warning early enough.
“Accusations serve no purpose…cooperation saves lives,” the post reads.
Chinese leader Xi said in a message to Nepal’s President Ram Chandra Poudel on Friday that Nepal was ready to “actively support Nepal’s rescue efforts.”
The two countries also communicated on the monitoring of dammed lakes that pose a risk of flooding and endangering the lives of rescue workers. Nepal does not have direct access to the area to conduct its own real-time surveillance, but updates were being passed between authorities and researchers on both sides, CNN reported earlier.
China has previously faced criticism for not sharing data and design information with India regarding the Yarlung Tsangpo mega dam project. It is also widely known that in response to the border conflict in 2017, water flow data for cross-border rivers was suspended for a certain period of time. The Chinese government champions data transparency.
At regular border talks in Beijing on Tuesday, Chinese and Indian officials pledged to maintain communication on sharing hydrological data and announced the next meeting of a roughly biennial meeting on transboundary rivers will be held next month.
Experts say that as the region remains a hotspot for infrastructure development, countries need to do more to design projects that take into account the complexity of natural disasters at the right scale, as well as regularly share data and jointly build systems to monitor early warning signs, especially as climate change increases risks.
“There’s an arrogance about the future in the sense that you think the future is going to be the same as the present,” Australia’s Gamble said. But because of climate change, “we don’t know what kind of situation we’re going to move into.”
