(TibetanReview.net, Oct02’26) – China says climate change caused the catastrophic Aug 26 Tibet-Nepal avalanche floods, which caused over 1,494 deaths and left more than 6,264 people missing across Nepal and Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), but nearly 22.5% of the global warming mining rights granted by it across the region lie within 5km of glaciers, said an indiatoday.in report Oct 1, citing an official TAR report.
These glaciers are located across key transboundary river basins. The finding has sharpened concerns that upstream mining could intensify flood and glacial lake-outburst risks downstream, the report said.
Mining can be not only environmentally devastating but it also, according to an https://www.icmm.com/global-datasets/ghg-emissions report Mar 10, 2026, accounts for roughly 4% to 11% of direct global greenhouse gas emissions, depending on how supply chains and metal processing are counted.
But climate change is not the whole story. Experts and scientists have increasingly warned that China’s upstream activities in Tibet, including large-scale infrastructure construction, massive militarisation, strategy-driven urbanisation, and dam construction, are destabilising sensitive ecosystems and directly increasing flood and disaster risks across the Himalayas, the report, authored by Tenzin Younten, a Senior Researcher at the 108 Peace Institute, said.
Meanwhile, disaster risks posed by Chinese mining operations near glaciers remain largely under-examined. A recently released Chinese environmental assessment for the TAR’s Mineral Resources Master Plan draft (2026–2030) documents that 156 of 694 mining rights across the region lie within five kilometres of glaciers, encompassing 1,810.94 square kilometres of glacier area, including several in the headwaters of trans-boundary rivers flowing toward India, Nepal, and Bhutan, the report said.
China’s glacier-adjacent mines in the Himalayas, with their detrimental impact on local hydrology and terrain stability, heighten the risk of disasters rapidly affecting communities far downstream. But instead of addressing these rising disaster risks and the impact of their upstream activities, China has enforced strict information control and moved to normalise the situation in the affected region by rebuilding the G-216 national highway alongside other infrastructure.
Yet, China’s own environmental assessment ranking of mining rights and planning units by glacier proximity in TAR shows that the exposure is concentrated on transboundary river basins near the international frontier. In fact, six of the 10 highest-ranked mining rights are located within the Yarlung Tsangpo basin alone. Besides, the two highest-ranked mining rights are both on the India-Tibet border. A third mine lies in Lhozhag (Lhodrag) County, on Tibet’s border with Bhutan, the report pointed out.
While these are only a few critically exposed sites on the most sensitive stretch of border disclosed in the top 10 rankings, the broader question is how many glacier-proximate mining operations exist or are planned across the Himalayan border between Tibet and its downstream neighbours, terrain comparable to the already unstable Rasuwa-Kerung corridor.
Besides, the Yarlung Tsangpo basin contains TAR’s densest mining footprint, with 48.6% of the region’s mining rights located here, the aforementioned Chinese official report, which is in Chinese, was cited as saying.
The report cited ICIMOD ( International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) and UNDP reports as saying at least 47 potentially dangerous glacial lakes are at risk of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), mainly within the Tibet–Nepal transboundary basins alone. Many more unmapped or unknown lakes likely exist across the major transboundary river basins flowing from Tibet, including the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Salween, Yangtze, Irrawaddy, and Mekong.
The proximity of mining operations near glaciers to the glacier-fed transboundary river system is causing significant additional disturbance to a region that is disaster-prone, the report said.
While climate change is already destabilising the region by altering the hydrological and geological conditions, aggressive human interventions such as excavation, blasting, waste generation, and altered drainage associated with mining could compound existing processes of glacier retreat, permafrost degradation, slope instability, and glacial-lake expansion, the indiatoday.in report further said.
India, as the primary downstream power with the most at stake, should push Beijing beyond just formal, transparent data-sharing on transboundary rivers and also hold China accountable for its upstream activities such as glacier-adjacent mining that raise such risks. After all, when disaster strikes, it makes no distinction between nationalities, the report concluded.