India and China aren't friends - but Nepal wants to unite them against climate threats

India and China are not allies, but Nepal is seeking to bring them together against climate dangers

Recent flooding in Nepal has underscored the importance of cross-border cooperation across the Himalayan region

Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah devoted much of his speech at the recent UN General Assembly to warning about the rising danger of climate-driven disasters in the Himalayas, referring to the destructive debris floods that hit his country in August.

Yet it was his bold idea of uniting regional rivals India and China, together with Nepal, to address these common threats that attracted the most attention.

Shah urged the establishment of a Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism to improve cross-border disaster response and the exchange of scientific data and expertise in one of the world’s most environmentally vulnerable and geopolitically delicate regions.

“Let the Himalayas become a laboratory of international co-operation rather than a frontier of fragmented information,” he said.

A senior official in Nepal’s foreign ministry, speaking anonymously, said the proposal was still at an initial stage.

“The PM's proposal has given a political direction. Our ministry is working with other relevant agencies to put forward a preliminary framework which can be the basis for building common understanding,” the official said.

Neither India nor China has officially replied to the proposal.

But can Nepal truly bring the two regional powers together to face a shared climate threat in a region where they have long been locked in bitter territorial disputes?

India and China share a disputed border stretching about 3,500km (2,175 miles), much of it across the Himalayas. Their rival territorial claims have sparked a war, deadly clashes and repeated military standoffs along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the de facto boundary dividing the areas they control.

Yet the mountains that have long been a source of tension between the two countries are also confronting an urgent climate threat.

Temperatures in the Himalayan region are rising faster than the global average, speeding glacier retreat and permafrost thaw and increasing the risks of landslides, rockfalls, avalanches and glacial lake outburst floods.

These disasters can cross national borders, endangering lives, infrastructure and livelihoods far downstream - making cooperation among the countries that share the Himalayas increasingly vital.

, external released in March found that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region are melting at an accelerating pace, with the rate of ice loss having doubled since 2000 compared with the 1974-1999 period.

Further east, on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, glaciers have shrunk by 24% in area over the past six decades, Kang Shichang, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, told China's People's Daily Online.

Experts say glacier retreat can cause glacial lakes to expand, raising the risk of sudden, potentially devastating floods that can cross borders into countries such as Nepal, India and Bhutan. Several major rivers flowing through these countries begin on the Tibetan Plateau.

The plateau now contains more than 14,000 glacial lakes, covering over 1,100 sq km, according to People's Daily.

And the risks go beyond flooding.

A 2024 study published by the American Geophysical Union forecast a major increase in landslide hazards across the Himalayas and Tibet in the coming decades because of heavier rainstorms.

While the biggest absolute increases are expected in already vulnerable areas, including India’s Garhwal and Kumaon regions and Nepal, the largest relative increase is projected on the Tibetan Plateau.

The rising dangers make cooperation more urgent. But previous attempts by India and China to collaborate on Himalayan environmental issues have achieved little.

The two Asian powers have often found common ground at UN climate negotiations, pushing back against Western demands for emissions cuts and arguing that developing countries should not face the same burden as industrialised nations.

Yet they have no dedicated agreement to jointly deal with the effects of climate change in the Himalayas.

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

After a visit to Beijing, India’s then environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced that the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology and China’s Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute would work together on the project.

But the initiative came to nothing, according to a scientist involved in the effort.

“One meeting was held between us and the Chinese side and that was it, nothing came out of it,” said Dr DP Dobhal, a retired glaciologist who led the glaciology programme at the Wadia Institute.

“What happened after that no one knows,” he added.

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

But in August 2025, India’s junior foreign minister Kirti Vardhan Singh told parliament that both agreements had expired. China had stopped sharing Brahmaputra data in June 2023, while India had received no Sutlej data since 2022.

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

Some analysts see a small sign of hope in the recent thaw between India and China, marked by high-level political engagement and efforts to revive cross-border trade through Himalayan routes.

“These developments suggest there might be more room for the three countries to explore climate-related co-operation,” says William Yang, senior analyst for North East Asia at the International Crisis Group.

But he says Beijing is likely to remain wary of any major agreement with India and Nepal, since border disputes remain unresolved.

One major obstacle is that information crucial to understanding climate risks can also have military value.

“What climate scientists might see as essential research data might look like strategic intelligence to the national security establishment in an environment where two militaries face each other across a disputed frontier,” says Walter Ladwig, an associate fellow in the Indo-Pacific Programme at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK-based defence and security think tank.

Such tensions have also hindered earlier efforts to deal with disasters that cross Himalayan borders.

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

“There are certain highly sensitive issues in transboundary matters like comprehensive data of river flows that countries might not want to share, particularly upstream countries,” says Arun Bhakta Shrestha, a former senior specialist at ICIMOD.

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

Dr Uday Kala, head of the Centre for Climate Change and Disaster Management at India’s IIT Mandi, recommends beginning with practical measures - jointly identifying high-risk glacial lakes and cross-border hazards, agreeing on basic data-sharing protocols and monitoring standards, and exchanging critical warnings without delay.

“Climate change is moving the baseline itself; catching up with the previous disaster is no longer enough. We need to anticipate the next one,” he says.

Whether India and China are prepared to take even these steps remains unclear.

For Nepal, the task is to persuade its two powerful neighbours to set aside their differences and work together to confront a shared climate threat.