Nepal: 6,000 still missing and big problems for China and India

Catastrophic Floods Saddle Nepal With a Power Conundrum and a Massive India-China Headache NEPAL Nepal Weeks after catastrophic floods swept through Nepal, people continue to bury and mourn the more than 1,400 people who died, while searching for thousands still missing after a glacier collapsed, sending a torrent of water, ice, rock and mud that engulfed entire villages. But anger is growing, too, especially toward Nepal’s two powerful neighbors, India and China, which many Nepalis blame for contributing to climate change, which they say caused the disaster. “After the glacial collapse happened two weeks ago, people in my region have realized that this can now happen anywhere in Nepal since the Himalayas are warming and glaciers are melting faster,” said Shreya KC, 28, whose home lies downstream from Himalayan glaciers in Solukhumbu, a mountainous district in eastern Nepal that includes Mount Everest. “Because of other countries, today Nepalis are the ones most impacted by climate change. So people want justice.” The Aug. 26 catastrophe began when a mass of rock and glacier ice broke away from a high mountain slope, unleashing debris-laden floodwaters that destroyed homes, roads, bridges and hydropower plants in parts of Nepal and Chinese-controlled Tibet. In Nepal, more than 6,000 people remain missing. Scientists don’t yet know precisely what triggered the collapse, but say global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions causes glaciers to melt faster and thaws permafrost that anchors ice and rock at high altitudes. Authorities estimate recovery will cost $5 billion. Now, Nepal is demanding compensation from the three largest greenhouse gas emitters – China, the United States and India. That demand is politically tricky because China and India are powerful neighbors on which tiny, landlocked Nepal depends for its trade routes and other needs. For Prime Minister Balendra Shah, an inexperienced national leader just five months into his term, the disaster has created two formidable tasks – rebuilding safely and performing the tricky balancing act of managing Nepal’s dependence on its two neighbors without leaning too far toward either Beijing or New Delhi. “The disaster serves as a geopolitical stress test,” wrote Fair Observer, a US nonprofit international affairs publication. “It struck precisely where two of Nepal’s long-running strategic dilemmas intersect.” As a landlocked country, Nepal long relied on transit routes through India to export its goods. To reduce that dependence, the country expanded the Kerung border crossing as its principal trade route with China following repeated border disruptions with India, most recently a 2015 blockade that Kathmandu blamed on New Delhi and that caused severe shortages. The floods have now destroyed infrastructure at the crossing, cutting off that trade route. “Kathmandu will need Chinese technical and financial assistance to restore damaged border infrastructure,” said the Diplomat, a Washington-based Asia affairs publication. “The floods could therefore produce a peculiar form of dual dependence: greater reliance on India for immediate trade and transit, even as Nepal turns to China to rebuild the infrastructure needed to reduce that very reliance.” Nepal now depends more heavily on India for electricity, too. The floods knocked out more than 10 percent of its generating capacity, forcing it to halt power exports and seek additional electricity from India. Before the disaster, almost all of Nepal’s power and nearly $200 million in annual export earnings came from hydropower. Meanwhile, the safety of some of Nepal’s hydropower projects is coming under scrutiny. Take Upper Trishuli-1, for example. The 216-megawatt hydropower project was being built in the flood’s path near Nepal’s border with Tibet. More than 90 percent of the $647 million project’s “upper facilities” were destroyed, a project official said, prompting questions about whether flood and landslide risks were truly addressed by its backers, which included the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group’s private-sector development arm. The Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower plant, which was also severely hit, was funded by the Export-Import Bank of China. International lenders were “acutely aware of the extreme danger to which they were exposing thousands of laborers, officials, residents, rivers, infrastructure and landscape,” Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, told the BBC. “Their own reports repeatedly highlighted it. But they did not take any preventive steps, did not demand stringent checks and balances, nor were they prepared for a calamity they knew could occur.” Some lenders defended the Upper Trishuli-1 project, saying its design “reflected findings from independent technical assessments that looked at the risks of flooding and landslides affecting the project site, using studies of the glaciers and glacial lakes and historical evidence available at the time.” Now, the government faces a major reconstruction challenge: rebuilding foreign-financed hydropower projects with stronger safeguards while restoring the electricity, export income and livelihoods they support. Nepal has already halted electricity exports and begun importing power from India to cover domestic shortages. “The disaster therefore presents Nepal with more than an immediate humanitarian emergency,” said the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. “For Kathmandu, Beijing and New Delhi, the question is not simply how to respond to this disaster, but how to reduce the economic and human consequences of the next one.”