Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Ever since the devastating floods hit Nepal on August 26, social media has been repleted with speculations whether China was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the calamity as it ignored delicate ecology in the Tibetan-Nepalese region while building infrastructure or developing real estate for Chinese migrants, and failed to alert Kathmandu about the impending disaster.
According to the media reports on Monday, Nepal and China discussed monitoring floods and glacier hazards in May 2026 itself, but Nepali officials said limited data-sharing left them without enough information to anticipate major disasters. Kathmandu also urged Beijing to provide real-time data for better preparedness but didn’t get it. In fact, it got an alert from China about the approaching flood only 45 minutes before the calamity struck.
At their May 27 meeting in Kathmandu, 10 officials from Nepal and about a dozen from China, including the Tibetan region where the disaster struck, discussed strengthening cooperation to monitor and respond to floods, weather and glacier-related hazards. The participants called for joint risk-reduction measures, including inventories of glacial lakes and hazard mapping.
But the Nepalese did not receive as much information as they wanted from China on glacier risks and water levels and they feared insufficient data sharing could hamper their ability to anticipate and prepare for major disasters.
China claims: provided data ‘timely’
No officials or experts have blamed either side for the natural disaster, which will cost an estimated tenth of Nepal’s annual economic output to recover from. Nepali officials say the priority is to deepen cooperation with China.
At the May meeting, the Chinese said they did not have the mandate to sign an agreement to meet Nepal’s requests, asking for further discussions, said Binod Parajuli, another Nepal government hydrologist.
China’s embassy in Nepal said in a statement on X on Saturday that Beijing and Kathmandu had kept in close contact on the issue and had made “substantial progress” on promoting cross-border disaster information sharing.
The August 26 flood started with a glacier collapse, which unleashed a catastrophic mudslide that has killed nearly 900 people, mainly in Nepal, and left around 5,000 missing so far.
The Chinese embassy rejected criticism from some Nepali social media users that China had failed to provide adequate warning. It also claimed that Chinese and international experts faced significant challenges monitoring hazards in the remote Himalayan region, and that China had shared important information with Nepal ‘in a timely manner.”
In the 2025 bilateral meeting, Nepal raised concerns about a flood in the same area, triggered by the sudden release of water from a glacial lake in Tibet that killed at least nine in Nepal and left more than a dozen missing.
“When the Chinese sees a heavy precipitation forecast in the Tibetan area, they provide us that forecast and those observations,” Parajuli said. But “not for avalanche and water level, landslides, extreme events.”
China began sharing forecasts of heavy rain in Tibet over China’s WeChat messaging app and email a month ago, Parajuli said.
Timeline
Twelve days before the August 26 disaster, China’s World Meteorological Centre told Nepali officials in an email that a monsoon depression was forecast for the area from August 14 to 19.
“Enhanced rainfall is likely across much of Nepal, and we wish to draw your attention to the potential for secondary and cascading hazards, including but not limited to landslides and flash floods,” China warned.
The Chinese embassy said China has been sharing information including monitoring data on a lake formed by debris from last week’s calamity.
The time that the torrent took to reach Nepal shows the value of early-warning systems, Parajuli said.
Around 8:32 a.m. Nepal time on Wednesday, the deluge blasted through a border crossing in Tibet as people attempted to flee, according to surveillance footage that has become a defining image of the disaster.
Twenty-six minutes later, Parajuli got a call from the chief of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, alerting him to a flood on the Trishuli river. His team found that a border monitoring station had not transmitted any data since 8:40.
After contacting local Nepali authorities to confirm the flooding, Parajuli said, his team sent a public alert to mobile phone users at 9:13.
At least four monitoring stations were destroyed by the flood that rampaged 168 km downstream from the Nepal-China border, carrying some 57.4 million cubic metres (2 billion cubic feet) of water, more than half again as much as normal.
Huge gush of mud
Surging floodwaters, which dislodged giant boulders and pulled large buildings into the overflow, damaged 19 bridges and some 40 km of highway, and knocked out more than 10% of Nepal’s power-generation capacity, according to the Stimson Center.
“It wasn’t water. It was a huge gush of mud coming straight at us,” said Keshav Prasad Baral of Tupche village, about 25 km downstream of the border. “I tried to grab my wife’s hand, but she was swept away by the mud.”
When part of the glacier broke away, crashing to the valley floor hundreds of metres below, it unleashed high-speed flash floods, according to preliminary assessments by Nepali authorities.
The Hindu Kush Himalayas, home to hundreds of millions of people from Afghanistan to Myanmar, contain the world’s largest volume of ice outside the poles, with more than 63,700 glaciers covering nearly 56,000 square km, almost the size of Croatia, and storing up to 5,700 cubic km of ice.
By comparison, the glacier chunk that caused the latest disaster carried an estimated 5 million cubic metres of ice and rock, according to Basanta Raj Adhikari, director of the Centre for Disaster Studies in Nepal’s Tribhuvan University.
Driven by climate change, glacier melt is accelerating as snow cover declines and snowfall becomes more erratic, according to a 2023 study by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development.
These changes will increase the likelihood of floods and landslides, as mountain communities also deal with such hazards as sedimentation and erosion, the centre projects.
Several of Nepal’s major river systems originate in Tibet, then flow through one of the world’s most seismically active and flood-prone regions.
Nepal’s authorities will seek to work with China to conduct research and build systems to monitor avalanches and the release of water from glacial lakes – major risks for mountain communities – Parajuli said.
He said his department will propose a data-sharing agreement with China, along the lines of an arrangement that Nepal has with neighbouring India, for more frequent information on precipitation and river levels, not just high-precipitation forecasts.
Nepal will seek data every 10 minutes so that “we can warn our people, save our people,” he said. “Our main target is we shouldn’t miss any future disaster.”