cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/58364835
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Despite warm relations with Beijing, and the Nepalese government’s assurances that it follows the “One China” principle and permits no support for Tibetans, China’s tight control over Tibet creates complications.
The region is administered as a militarised frontier. Access runs on permits and clearances, the area is closely watched by armed police and the military and outsiders – foreign journalists, independent researchers, at times even diplomats – are routinely kept out. Tibet is an information black hole.
Beijing’s anxiety extends across the border as Nepal is home to more than 10,000 Tibetan refugees and has long been the main escape route out of Tibet. China pressurises Nepal to police Tibetan activism, seal crossings and fold border management into a security partnership meant to insulate the plateau from the outside world.
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The glacial and hydrological data from the Tibetan plateau, the information often needed to anticipate flooding, is also treated as strategically sensitive by China and is closely held. Nepal has no mechanism to receive real-time glacial lake and river data from the Chinese side and its officials have sometimes gone further, accusing Beijing of withholding it.
When a disaster in the Nepal-Tibet border region demands that rescuers cross quickly or that a warning travel downstream from an upstream lake, it runs into a system built for control rather than speed.
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Growing evidence suggests the recent glacier collapse happened on the Nepalese side of the border, near the Langtang Lirung peak. But wherever the flood began, no warning reached the people in its path.
Officials in Nepal’s Rasuwa district said they had “no clue” it was coming. Some of this will have been down to the speed of the ice-avalanche flood, which may have left little to warn of. Nepal’s own monitoring stations upstream were swept away before they could send an alert.
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But [...] there is a deeper, more structural point to make here. There is no standing, obligatory system to move warnings through this border region in real time. Much of the data that could carry such a warning sits inside a region that China governs first for state security.
When a lake in Tibet burst in 2016 and flooded the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal, for example, no warning came either. Nepali hydrology officials said afterwards that China had for years failed to share “essential” data on the glacial lakes on its side of the border.
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Climate change is turning the Tibetan plateau into a source of cascading danger for everyone downstream, from Nepal to India and Bangladesh. Addressing it means treating the Himalayas as a shared ecological space that is a zone of contact rather than a zone of conflict.
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