China and India should do more to save the Himalaya system

Nepal is still counting the cost of the August 26 flood in the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers, but the scale of the destruction is already clear. Damage across Rasuwa, Nuwakot and other districts appears greater than that caused by any single river-basin flood in the country’s living memory. Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle has given a preliminary estimate of $5 billion.

Geologists and climate scientists have described the event as an ice-and-rock avalanche followed by a glacial surge flood. Others have called it a “Himalayan Tsunami,” a phrase that captures the force of the devastation. Nepal, India, Pakistan and China have previously reported rising temperatures, shrinking snow cover, melting glaciers and glacial lake outburst floods. What sets the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli disaster apart, the article argues, is its magnitude.

The immediate crisis has brought the country together, while people hope such an event will not happen again. Yet the region’s warming trend makes that hope difficult to sustain. Across the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, temperatures are rising two to five times faster than the global average. Seasonal weather patterns are changing, snow cover is declining, glaciers are losing mass, permafrost is thawing and glacial lakes are multiplying.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development has documented 25,614 glacial lakes across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, covering 1,444 square kilometres. More than a billion people live in the wider Himalayan region, making its environmental vulnerability a matter of regional consequence.

The article therefore asks whether China and India should do more than provide emergency assistance. It calls for them to help lead a regional response, potentially through legal agreements similar to arrangements used to protect mountain systems in the Alps, Andes and Carpathians. Such cooperation, it says, would reflect two duties recognised in customary international law: preventing significant environmental harm and cooperating to protect the environment.