Why Tibet, Asia’s water tower, cannot remain an ecological black box

In December 2009, at COP15 in Copenhagen, I was part of an exile Tibetan delegation arguing that Tibet needed to be seen not only as a political question, but as an ecological one. We campaigned for recognition of the Tibetan Plateau as the “Third Pole”. Our message was simple: environmental change on the plateau would be felt far beyond Tibet.

Even then, we knew there was a contradiction. We could campaign openly about Tibet’s environment because we were outside Tibet. Inside the plateau, public discussion of environmental policy and independent reporting operated under much tighter political constraints.

Six years later, as a member of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, I helped organise the first climate rally for Tibet in New Delhi with a simple message: ‘Tibet’s Rivers, Asia’s Lifeline.’ During that campaign, we met Indian and international policymakers, including former environment minister Jairam Ramesh, to argue that downstream countries needed a stronger voice in how Tibet’s shared rivers were understood and managed.

The floods of August 26 have made that argument painfully immediate.

A colossal slope failure high in the Himalayas sent rock, ice and sediment crashing into the valley below, triggering a cascade of landslide, debris flow and flash flood along the Nepal-Tibet border. By September 9, Reuters reported that at least 1,380 people had been confirmed dead and around 5,500 remained missing across Nepal and Tibet.

Early accounts described a glacial collapse. Subsequent reporting in Science, based on researchers’ analysis of seismic records and satellite imagery, indicates that a massive rock landslide probably initiated the cascade, carrying glacier ice with it. Scientists are still investigating what destabilised the mountainside and what role, if any, climate change played in this particular event. But the catastrophe unfolded against a background of rapid Himalayan warming, glacier loss, thawing permafrost and increasingly unstable high-mountain environments.

What happened next matters for another reason. Researchers across countries pooled seismic and satellite data and revised the initial explanation as new evidence emerged. Science depends on information crossing borders.

Yet one of the world’s most ecologically consequential landscapes is also one of its most restricted information environments. The Guardian reported that footage from the Tibetan side circulated briefly on Chinese social media before disappearing, while some eyewitness accounts published by smaller Chinese outlets were removed. Security officials penalised at least 10 people for sharing what authorities called “false disaster information”, and independent journalistic access remained tightly restricted.

Nearly two weeks later, Chinese authorities took a selected group of foreign reporters on a state-guided tour of the affected area. The New York Times said it was not invited. At the time of the tour, China had not yet released an official list of those missing in Tibet. A guided visit offered a window onto the disaster, but not the freedom to report from it independently.

Beijing rejects allegations of censorship and says information has been released transparently and in a timely manner. China has also mounted a substantial rescue effort. Both facts matter. Rescue efforts and information controls are not mutually exclusive.

The problem is not that no information emerges from Tibet. It is that authorities retain tight control over what can be reported, independently verified and challenged. Satellite imagery can reveal a broken mountainside, but it cannot interview survivors or replace independent ground access and freely shared local knowledge.

In a climate emergency, information is infrastructure.

For too long, Tibet has been treated primarily as a question of human rights and cultural survival. Those concerns remain fundamental. But the climate crisis adds another dimension: Tibet is also an ecological and geopolitical question.

The Tibetan Plateau, often called Asia’s water tower, contains the headwaters of some of the continent’s great river systems. India sits downstream in a very literal sense. To the east, the Yarlung Tsangpo crosses into Arunachal Pradesh as the Siang and becomes the Brahmaputra in Assam before flowing into Bangladesh. To the west, the Sengge Zangbo—the upper Indus—rises on the Tibetan Plateau before entering Ladakh and continuing into Pakistan. China has begun construction of the Great Bend hydropower project upstream in Tibet. A 2024 International Campaign for Tibet study mapped a sample of 193 hydropower dams built or planned across Tibet since 2000, almost 80 per cent of them large or mega dams.

My concern, however, is not limited to one dam. In a highly seismic and climate-vulnerable region, development on this scale makes independent environmental assessment, hazard monitoring and cross-border information-sharing more important, not less.

The limits of current arrangements are already visible. Reuters reported that only three months before the disaster, Nepal sought deeper cooperation with China on glacier hazards and water data, but the talks did not produce the formal agreement Kathmandu was seeking. Beijing says its data-sharing has been timely. After the disaster, Nepal renewed its call for more comprehensive information and systems capable of sharing critical data in near real time.

No one can say that better data-sharing would have prevented this disaster. Some high-mountain failures may remain extraordinarily difficult to predict. But that uncertainty is precisely why open information, rapid scientific cooperation and resilient warning systems matter.

What the region needs is routine cooperation before disaster strikes: reliable channels for sharing river, weather, glacier and earthquake data; stronger early-warning systems; joint scientific work; clearer information about major upstream projects; and greater independent access for researchers and journalists after environmental disasters. These arrangements should not depend on whether political relations happen to be good or bad.

The Dalai Lama has warned about Tibet’s fragile ecology for nearly four decades. Environmental protection was one of the five components of his 1987 Five-Point Peace Plan. After the August floods, he again warned that repeated calamities might reflect “a deeper underlying cause — whether climate change or other factors”. That warning now has implications far beyond Tibet.

For Tibetans like me, Chinese rule in Tibet has long raised questions of political freedom, cultural survival and self-determination. The climate crisis does not displace those concerns. It adds another reality: the way Tibet is governed has ecological consequences beyond Tibet.

People living downstream should not have to depend on political goodwill for information about hazards upstream. That is not an intrusion into sovereignty; it is part of what responsible neighbours owe one another.

At COP15 in 2009 and again in New Delhi in 2015, we were asking the world to recognise that what happens to Tibet's environment matters far beyond Tibet. The August disaster has made the regional consequences of that argument much harder to ignore.

A rapidly warming Third Pole cannot safely remain an ecological black box. The rivers of the Tibetan Plateau cross borders. The information needed to understand their risks must cross them too.

(Dhardon Sharling is a former member of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile and former Secretary of the Central Tibetan Administration’s Department of Information and International Relations. She is a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches communication, ecology and sustainability. Her environmental advocacy on Tibet includes COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 and the 2015 Climate Action for Tibet campaign in New Delhi. She has also developed museum interpretive content on Tibet’s environment for The Tibet Museum in Dharamsala, as well as on the Dalai Lama’s environmental commitments for the upcoming Dalai Lama Centre for Tibetan and Indian Ancient Wisdom in Bodh Gaya.)

(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)