China, Nepal agree to expand flood data sharing after Himalayan disaster

Wang Yi, director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party and concurrently China's foreign minister, spoke by phone with Nepali Foreign Minister Sishir Kanel on Saturday and agreed to expand the sharing of real-time hydrological data.

According to China's state-run Xinhua News Agency and AFP, Wang said during the call that China had shared critical information with Nepal, including disaster-area imagery, satellite data and hydrological data. He said the information also included warning data related to upstream glacial lake outburst floods.

Wang said China and Nepal are "connected by mountains and rivers and form a community of shared destiny," adding that "in the face of disaster, the two countries must overcome difficulties together and demonstrate through concrete action the longstanding friendship that transcends the Himalayas."

The call came shortly after Nepal reversed course on accepting foreign assistance. The Nepali government had initially said it would not accept foreign search-and-rescue support following the massive floods that struck the Himalayan border region on Wednesday, but later said it would accept foreign experts from China, South Korea and other countries in certain specialized fields. Casualties have been rising rapidly since the disaster.

China dispatched five tunnel experts to Nepal that day to assist with rescue operations at a hydropower plant tunnel.

According to a statement from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kanel expressed gratitude to China and said Nepal would work closely with Beijing to do everything possible to rescue isolated and missing Chinese nationals, as well as missing foreigners from other countries.

Kanel also said he hoped to strengthen cooperation with China in areas including recovery and reconstruction, disaster prevention and mitigation, and climate change response.

Nepal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the two sides also discussed expanding cooperation on real-time hydrological data sharing and strengthening mechanisms to build an effective early warning system.

Some observers have raised questions about whether China could have issued an earlier warning to Nepal about the floods, but China has rebuffed such claims, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Chinese Embassy in Nepal said Saturday that China has been making every effort to monitor hazards across the Himalayan terrain and share relevant information with neighboring countries.

However, the embassy said the risks are spread across the entire Himalayan range and that the 2015 earthquake destabilized much of the rock on southern slopes, making such work highly complex. It added that imaging errors on steep slopes and high-precision monitoring of vast and complex terrain remain an internationally recognized challenge.

Some Nepali media outlets and social media users have circulated claims that the floods were caused by the collapse of a lake in Tibet or by Chinese infrastructure construction.

Scientists, however, currently believe the floods were triggered by the collapse of glaciers and rock on the Nepali side of the mountains.

Meanwhile, China announced that as of 6 p.m. Sunday, the mudslide disaster in Shigatse, Tibet Autonomous Region, linked to the Nepal floods had left 16 people dead and 546 missing, including 261 foreigners.

The missing foreigners came from 23 countries, including Nepal (104), India (49), Latvia (33), the United States (18) and the United Kingdom (15). No South Korean nationals were among the missing in Tibet.

China held a press conference Sunday hosted by the Information Office of the Tibet Autonomous Region People's Government and said it had notified the relevant countries' embassies and consulates in Beijing of the situation.