Climate & environment, explained.
A family photograph recovered in the aftermath of flash floods at Devighat in Nepal's Nuwakot district (Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images)
The Alpine Convention proves cross-border governance works – Himalayan distrust may demand something firmer.
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The Himalayas need a treaty before the next floodThe Himalayas need a treaty before the next flood
Early warning systems along the Nepal–China border were built to detect monsoon floods (Opens in new window), not to capture an intense glacial breakdown. Last year, a sudden flood killed nine people (Opens in new window) and was afterwards described as a monitoring blind spot (Opens in new window). The magnitude of this latest disaster – with a confirmed toll already passed 1,000 and still climbing (Opens in new window) – shows the danger and lines of responsibility for early warning systems remain unclear. (Opens in new window)
When a landscape is shared by several nations, the likely outcome is separate responses, each stopping at their own border. Developmental decisions also play out the same way: dams, roads, and diversions get built upstream without regard for cross-border consequences, and the accountability keeps getting conveniently shifted.
There’s a precedent for doing things differently, set by another mountain range in a different part of the world. The Alpine Convention (Opens in new window) has bound eight European countries and the EU to share oversight of the Alps since 1995 and manage it as a single geographical unit instead of eight fragmented ones. Ratification did take some years (Opens in new window) and it helped that it was built among states that were already close partners.
When a landscape is shared by several nations, the likely outcome is separate responses, each stopping at their own border.
The Himalayas start out fragile in comparison. Their tectonic plates collide faster (Opens in new window) than those of the Alps, producing more frequent and bigger earthquakes. The range also spans across countries that have still not agreed where their shared borders lie. Binding cooperation would have to hold between governments that already don’t trust each other about far more than glaciers.
The path forward requires an independent, shared body with geological and developmental experts drawn from each country along the mountain range along with international experts. A body like this could run monitoring and disaster detection at a scale no single nation’s capacity could match. Any project in a shared, high-risk landscape would need that body’s assessment of the damage it can cause.
How such a body would be composed and what the directive would be when states disagree are not easy questions to resolve. The International Seabed Authority (Opens in new window), which has held binding legal power over deep-sea mining since 1994, still hasn’t finished the rules that would dictate the use of its powers. The Mekong River Commission in Southeast Asia is another transborder organisation which has also seen its share (Opens in new window) of power struggles.
A Himalayan body would be worth building only if funding and enforcement were guaranteed from the outset. But sustainability cannot be an afterthought. Nepal’s floods are an unwelcome reckoning: nature doesn’t care about imagined borders and disasters have no boundaries.
About the author
Debomita Dasgupta
Debomita Dasgupta is a policy economist and researcher specialising in Indo-Pacific maritime governance, environmental economics, and the political economy of gender.
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