Nepal’s former Forest and Environment Minister Madhav Prasad Chaulagain has claimed that China didn’t warn them before the devastating floods tore through the country, leaving hundreds dead and thousands missing.
Nepal’s early-warning systems and environmental impact assessments for hydropower projects concentrated on glacial lakes. In an interview with NDTV, he said that Nepal did not receive any timely warning from the Chinese side before a wall of ice, rock and mud tore through the Nepal-Tibet border at around 8:40 am on Wednesday. A smaller glacier incident in 2025 had already produced an agreed protocol, but that mechanism was not used.
Chaulagain said the human cost was worsened by a failure of information-sharing between the two neighbours. “We missed that opportunity,” he said. “Things are not so clear,” he said, calling for greater transparency. This event involved ice-rock falls and the collapse of a glacier-fed river system that “was never envisioned”, he said. Withholding data, he said, is “against humanity”.
