The Tibetan plateau is home to vast glacial reserves, which amount to the largest store of fresh water outside the arctic and the antarctic. It is also the source of 10 major Asian river systems — including the Yellow and Yangtze rivers of China, the Mekong, Salween and Irrawaddy rivers of Southeast Asia, and the Indus and Brahmaputra of South Asia — which supply water to nearly 20 percent of the global population. And, now, it is the site of a slow-burning environmental calamity that is threatening the water security, ecological balance and geopolitical stability of the entire Asian continent.
For more than two decades, China has been engaged in an aggressive and opaque dam-building spree, centered on — though not limited to — the Tibetan plateau. Yet China’s government has refused to negotiate a water-sharing treaty with any of the downriver countries, which must suffer the consequences of their upstream neighbor’s whims.
Already, Chinese-built megadams near the plateau’s border have brought water levels in the Mekong River to unprecedentedly low levels, with devastating effects on fisheries and livelihoods across Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. As the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam retreats — driven partly by Chinese dams — rice farmers are being forced to abandon their traditional livelihoods, instead farming shrimp or growing reeds.
Illustration: Louise Ting
Yet China’s dam ambitions continue to grow. The Three Gorges Dam, which runs along the Yangtze River, is the largest in the world, but it will be dwarfed by the dam China is building on the Yarlung Zangbo, also known as the Brahmaputra River, in a seismically active region of the Tibetan plateau. If completed, the project would drastically alter water flows into India and Bangladesh, threaten the region’s food security and ecological balance, and increase China’s geopolitical leverage over downstream countries.
The specter of water weaponization looms large.
In fact, water is fast becoming the new oil — a strategic resource with the potential to trigger conflicts. Already, water disputes within and between countries are intensifying.
However, China’s assault on the Tibetan plateau extends beyond water. Its avaricious mining of Tibet’s mineral-rich lands — which boast critical resources such as lithium, gold and copper — is contributing to deforestation and producing toxic discharge, while providing cover for China’s militarization of the plateau.
It is impossible to know the full extent of China’s destruction. The area is off limits to international observers and efforts by members of indigenous Tibetan communities — whose cultural reverence for nature has underpinned a long history of sound environmental stewardship — to sound the alarm are quickly quelled, often through imprisonment or exile.
However, there is no doubt that the Tibetan plateau’s ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragile, especially given its heightened vulnerability to climate change. The plateau is warming at twice the global average rate and its ice is melting faster than at the poles — trends that are reducing its water-storage capacity and reshaping river flows.
The implications are far-reaching. The Tibetan plateau, which towers over the rest of Asia (rising into the troposphere), profoundly influences Asian climatic, weather and monsoonal patterns, and even affects atmospheric general circulation — the system of winds that transports warm air from the equator toward higher latitudes — in the Northern Hemisphere. Its degradation will exacerbate droughts and floods, accelerate biodiversity loss, contribute to agricultural collapse, and fuel mass migration across Asia and beyond.
Despite these risks, the international community, from global climate forums to multilateral institutions such as the UN and the World Bank, has been deafeningly silent about Tibet. The reason is not ignorance, but fear: China has used its clout to suppress meaningful criticism of its actions on the “roof of the world.”
Given the stakes, the international community cannot afford to let itself be cowed by China. Countries must relentlessly press for transparency about China’s activities on the Tibetan plateau. Specifically, China must share real-time hydrological data and submit its projects for international environmental assessment. Independent environmental researchers and monitors must be granted unfettered access to the plateau to gather vital data and conduct unbiased analyses.
China must also be held accountable for its violations of the rights of indigenous communities — including the nearly 1 million Tibetans who have been forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands since 2000.
Western governments and multilateral institutions have leverage. By tying environmental transparency, respect for indigenous rights, and equitable management of shared river systems to trade agreements and climate cooperation, they can compel China to change its behavior. Direct support for indigenous Tibetan voices and civil-society networks would also help boost transparency.
Ignoring the unfolding crisis on the Tibetan plateau might seem expedient; after all, China has plenty of economic and geopolitical clout — and it is not afraid to use it, but the costs of inaction would be staggering.
Tibet is Asia’s ecological lifeline. China must not be allowed to use it in ways that threaten to upend the lives of people throughout the continent and beyond.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
A failure by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to respond to Israel’s brilliant 12-day (June 12-23) bombing and special operations war against Iran, topped by US President Donald Trump’s ordering the June 21 bombing of Iranian deep underground nuclear weapons fuel processing sites, has been noted by some as demonstrating a profound lack of resolve, even “impotence,” by China. However, this would be a dangerous underestimation of CCP ambitions and its broader and more profound military response to the Trump Administration — a challenge that includes an acceleration of its strategies to assist nuclear proxy states, and developing a wide array
Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), former chairman of Broadcasting Corp of China and leader of the “blue fighters,” recently announced that he had canned his trip to east Africa, and he would stay in Taiwan for the recall vote on Saturday. He added that he hoped “his friends in the blue camp would follow his lead.” His statement is quite interesting for a few reasons. Jaw had been criticized following media reports that he would be traveling in east Africa during the recall vote. While he decided to stay in Taiwan after drawing a lot of flak, his hesitation says it all: If
Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers are facing recall votes on Saturday, prompting nearly all KMT officials and lawmakers to rally their supporters over the past weekend, urging them to vote “no” in a bid to retain their seats and preserve the KMT’s majority in the Legislative Yuan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had largely kept its distance from the civic recall campaigns, earlier this month instructed its officials and staff to support the recall groups in a final push to protect the nation. The justification for the recalls has increasingly been framed as a “resistance” movement against China and
Owing to the combined majority of the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), the legislature last week voted to further extend the current session to the end of next month, prolonging the session twice for a total of 211 days, the longest in Taiwan’s democratic history. Legally, the legislature holds two regular sessions annually: from February to May, and from September to December. The extensions pushed by the opposition in May and last week mean there would be no break between the first and second sessions this year. While the opposition parties said the extensions were needed to
RSS