India and China Aren't Friends, But Nepal Wants to Unite Them Against Climate Threats

Can Nepal Bring Two Regional Giants Together to Confront a Shared Climate Threat in the Himalayas?

By Naveen Singh Khadka, Environment Correspondent, BBC World Service

Nepal's Prime Minister Balendra Shah used many of his speeches at the recent UN General Assembly to warn of the growing risk of climate disasters in the Himalayas, recalling the devastating floods that hit his country in August.

But it was his ambitious proposal to bring together regional rivals India and China, alongside Nepal, to counter these shared threats that drew particular attention.

Shah called for the creation of a Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism to strengthen cross-border disaster response and share scientific data and expertise in one of the world's most ecologically fragile and geopolitically sensitive regions.

"Let the Himalayas become a laboratory of international cooperation rather than a frontier of scattered information," he said.

A senior official in Nepal's foreign ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the proposal was still in its early stages.

The official said: "The prime minister's proposal has given political direction. Our ministry is working with other relevant organizations to provide an initial framework that can be the basis for creating a common understanding."

Neither India nor China has officially responded to the proposal. The BBC has contacted their Foreign Office for comment.

But can Nepal really bring two regional giants together to tackle a common climate threat in a region long embroiled in bitter territorial disputes?

India and China share a 3,500 km (2,175 mi) disputed border, much of it across the Himalayas. Their competing territorial claims have led to wars, deadly clashes and frequent military clashes along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the border that de facto separates the areas under their control.

But the mountains, which have long been a source of friction between the two countries, also face an immediate climate threat.

Temperatures in the Himalayan region are rising faster than the global average, accelerating glacier retreat and permanent ice melt, contributing to increased risks of landslides, rockfalls, avalanches and glacial lake outbursts.

Such disasters can transcend national boundaries and threaten lives, infrastructure and livelihoods far downstream – making cooperation between the Himalayan Commonwealth increasingly important.

A report by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, released in March, found that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region are melting at a rapid rate, with ice loss doubling since 2000 compared to 1999-74.

In the east, on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, glaciers have shrunk by 24 percent in area over the past six decades, Kang Shichang, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute, told Chinese People's Daily Online.

Experts say retreating glaciers could expand glacial lakes and increase the risk of potentially devastating flash floods that could cross borders into countries such as Nepal, India and Bhutan. Several major rivers that flow through these countries originate in the Tibetan Plateau.

According to People's Daily, the plateau now has more than 14,000 glacial lakes covering more than 1,100 square kilometers.

A 2024 study published by the American Geophysical Union predicted a significant increase in landslide hazards across the Himalayas and Tibet in the coming decades due to increased rainstorms.

While the greatest absolute increase is expected in currently vulnerable regions, including the Garhwal and Kumaon regions of India and Nepal, the greatest relative increase is projected in the Tibetan Plateau.

Increasing risks make cooperation more urgent. But past efforts by India and China to work together on environmental issues in the Himalayas have not made much progress.

The two Asian powers have often found common ground at UN climate talks, pushing back against Western demands to cut emissions, arguing that developing countries should not bear the same burden as industrialized nations.

However, they have no specific agreement to jointly address the effects of climate change in the Himalayas.

In 2009, India and China agreed to conduct joint research on the impact of global warming on glaciers in the Himalayas and Tibet.

India's then Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, after visiting Beijing, announced that the Himalayan Wadia Institute of Geology and the China Institute of Environmental Research and Engineering of Cold and Arid Zones would collaborate on the project.

But according to a scientist who participated in this effort, this initiative did not go anywhere.

Dr DP Dobhal, a retired glaciologist who heads the glaciology program at the Wadia Institute, said: "There was a meeting between us and the Chinese side and that was it, nothing came of it."

He added: No one knows what happened after that.

Since the early 2000s, India and China have had agreements under which Beijing provides flood-season hydrological data on the Brahmaputra and Sutlej, two major rivers that originate in Tibet.

But in August 2025, Indian Foreign Minister Kirti Vardhan Singh told Parliament that both agreements had expired. China had stopped sharing data on the Brahmaputra in June 2023, while India had not received any data on the Sutlej since 2022.

China has not publicly explained the latest hiatus. But when it withheld similar information in 2017 amid a tense military standoff with India, Beijing blamed technical problems at its hydrological monitoring stations in Tibet, Singh said.

Some analysts see a glimmer of hope in the recent warming between India and China, marked by high-level political engagement and moves to revive cross-border trade via the Himalayan routes.

These developments may provide more room for the three countries to explore climate-related cooperation, says William Yang, senior Northeast Asia analyst at the International Crisis Group.

But he says Beijing is likely to remain cautious about any major deal with India and Nepal, as border disputes remain unresolved.

One of the main obstacles is that information critical to understanding climate risks can also have military value.

"What climate scientists might see as essential research data might be strategic information for the National Security Agency in an environment where two militaries are facing each other across a disputed border," says Walter Ludwig, a fellow in the Indo-Pacific program at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK-based defense and security think tank.

Such tensions have also hampered past efforts to deal with disasters that cross the Himalayan border.

The Kathmandu-based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) has spent more than three decades promoting regional cooperation, including flood early warning systems. But progress has been slow.

Arun Bhakta Shrestha, former ICIMOD Senior Specialist, says, “There are very sensitive issues in transboundary issues like comprehensive river flow data that countries may not want to share, especially upstream countries.

He says countries should instead focus on sharing less sensitive information about disaster risks.