After the flood, Nepal and China agreed in principle to share real-time information about floods, landslides and glacial lakes. However, despite Nepal’s foreign minister raising the issue during a visit to China in May 2026, no formal agreement has been signed.
Across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountain ranges, rivers, weather systems and infrastructure frequently span national boundaries. Our ongoing research shows a hazard that begins in one place can have lethal consequences – and create new warning requirements – far downstream.
A warming climate is increasing these risks by thinning glaciers, thawing permafrost and destabilising slopes, even if climate change isn’t the sole explanation for every disaster. Meanwhile, roads and hydropower projects are putting more people and infrastructure in threatened valleys.
Cooperation has to come before the disaster
Some cross-border early-warning arrangements already exist between Nepal and its neighbours, particularly for recurring floods. But sudden, cascading events such as the recent disaster pose a different challenge. A warning has value only if it travels the whole distance – from a sensor in the mountains, through scientific agencies, national and local authorities, to households in the valleys and plains below, in the minutes that matter.
Community-based flood warning already works in parts of Nepal’s Koshi basin, where upstream gauges and trained local volunteers buy downstream villages precious time.
A regional early warning system would have to link these community-level systems with national and cross-border monitoring, so that information can move from the source of a hazard to the people at risk. That means agreeing in advance what should be shared, how warnings should be passed between countries and agencies, and what action they should trigger.
That requires institutional changes and political commitment, as much as new technology. The region’s existing water treaties were written to divide flows and manage dams and barrages, not to govern cascading hazards in the high mountains.
Governments could establish permanent bodies responsible for Himalayan rivers and their associated hazards. Featuring both scientists and policymakers, and linked to counterparts in neighbouring countries, these public bodies would be mandated to share data, jointly monitor glaciers, lakes and slopes, and coordinate warnings across borders.
The aim would be to make cooperation routine and sustained between disasters, rather than improvised in a crisis when events may unfold too quickly for international debate. None of this requires neighbours to resolve their wider disputes; it asks only that disaster warning be ring-fenced as shared humanitarian infrastructure that keeps working unabated.
The technologies for predicting and monitoring high-mountain hazards are improving fast. We now need more international scientific and policy cooperation, and warning systems capable of turning these observations into rapid action.
