Flash floods on the Tibetan Himalayan border: a man-made disaster rather than a natural disaster

◎ Tang Minghui

At the end of August, flash floods broke out on the Himalayan border between Shigatse, Tibet and Nepal, severely damaging the Gyirong Port and downstream settlements. More than a thousand people were killed, injured and missing. In the face of the disaster, Beijing officials immediately blamed the extreme weather and high-altitude glacier collapse on the force majeure, and even tried to shift the blame to Nepal. However, this transnational hydrological catastrophe is by no means a pure natural disaster, but a man-made disaster caused by the Beijing authorities’ forcible reshaping of the plateau landscape in the past decade with the will of national defense.

Flash floods broke out on the Himalayan border, severely damaging the Jilong port and downstream settlements, leaving more than a thousand people dead, injured and missing. The picture shows after the flood. (AP file photo)

Since the Tibet Autonomous Region launched the "Border Well-off Villages" project in 2017, officials have built more than 620 modern settlements in 21 border counties. These artificial villages are mixed military and civilian defense lines integrated with strategic highways, hydropower stations, and power networks. In order to anchor the country's geographical control at the border, the engineering team aggressively drove into extremely fragile glacial rivers and alpine canyons, carried out large-scale rock drilling and dam construction, and destroyed fragile permafrost slopes, bringing the unstable hydrological network to the verge of collapse.

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Since the CCP promoted the "Border Well-off Village" project in Tibet, engineering teams have carried out large-scale rock drilling and dam construction to intercept water flows, destroying fragile permafrost slopes and putting the unstable hydrological network on the verge of collapse. The picture shows the Zangmu Hydropower Station. (AFP file photo)

When dense military and civilian infrastructure and settlements forcibly cut into narrow river valley drainage channels, the exposure of man-made facilities and the population to disasters is greatly increased, and the natural runoff paths are directly disrupted. In the face of extreme rainfall or glacier outbursts, the originally dispersed release of hydrological energy is intensified into giant flood peaks. Extreme climate only induces disasters, and excessive human intervention is what amplifies natural changes into catastrophic disasters.

If Beijing continues to ignore the hydrological carrying capacity of the Himalayas and the safety of its neighboring countries, and uses ecological barriers as a tool for fortressing, similar ecological disasters may follow.

(The author is a doctoral candidate at the National Development and Research Institute of National Taiwan University and a director of the Taiwan Security and Development Association)