At UN, Nepal PM Calls for India-China Pact to Protect Melting Himalayas
Nepal's Prime Minister Balendra Shah has proposed a Himalayan Climate Resilience Mechanism led by Nepal, India and China, telling the United Nations General Assembly that a warming climate is destabilising the fragile Himalayan ecology and that the risks cannot be managed by any one country alone.
Addressing the 81st session of the General Assembly on Thursday (September 24), in his first speech to the world body, Mr. Shah said the Hindu Kush Himalaya is home to nearly two billion people and supplies water, ecosystems, agriculture and livelihoods far beyond Nepal's borders. "The Himalayas are not peripheral to the planet. They are part of the planet's life-support system," he said.
The proposal follows the flash floods that struck northern and central Nepal after an ice-rock avalanche near the Nepal-Tibet border on August 26. The floods swept through towns and villages, and the death toll has reached 1,452, with between 4,700 and 6,000 people still reported missing.
Under the proposed mechanism, the three countries would share satellite data and technical expertise, monitor dangerous glacial lakes, strengthen joint early-warning systems and coordinate assistance across borders when disasters strike. "Let the Himalayas become a laboratory of international cooperation, rather than a frontier of fragmented information," Mr. Shah said.
He described how melting permafrost is fracturing mountain slopes beneath the glaciers, accelerating the risk of ice-rock avalanches, floods, landslides and other cascading hazards — devastation that was felt on both sides of the Nepal-China border and carried downstream towards India. "Climate change does not recognise borders," he said. "Glaciers and floods do not travel with a visa stamped on passports."
Nepal now faces a heavy task of recovery and reconstruction. Rapid assessments place physical recovery needs at about 10 per cent of GDP. Mr. Shah expressed Nepal's deep gratitude to India and China, which he said offered prompt and generous assistance, and to other friendly countries, the United Nations system, humanitarian agencies, philanthropies and people around the world.
He also used the address to argue that global systems respond more reliably to conflict than to hunger and climate hardship. "Intercontinental missiles arrive on time. Rifles and ammunition cross borders, clear every bottleneck, meet each deadline. But a peasant in Nepal cannot procure his fertiliser or fuel at market price at a time of need," he said. "We have built a world with flawless logistics for war and broken logistics for food."
Mr. Shah said this is not Nepal's private misfortune, naming Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as countries in the region facing similar pressures. "Hit by the climate we did not warm, and hit again by the wars we did not start," he said, adding that this points to deeper flaws in the present order of global cooperation.
Any such mechanism would require the agreement of India and China, both of which share Himalayan borders and glacier-fed river systems with Nepal. There was no immediate public response from either government to the proposal. The Hindu Kush Himalaya holds the largest concentration of ice outside the polar regions and feeds major rivers including the Ganga, Brahmaputra, Indus and Mekong.
The address marks Nepal's effort to place mountain climate risks on the international agenda, at a time when many countries are contending with the cost of disaster response and reconstruction.
