By Ashiq Hussain
Gilgit-Baltistan is one of the most heavily glaciated regions on Earth outside the polar ice caps, home to more than 7,000 glaciers feeding the Indus River system that sustains the entire country downstream. Glaciers and permanent snow cover roughly a quarter of the region’s land area. Yet this same frozen wealth is now becoming Pakistan’s single most dangerous climate liability, and the warning signs are no longer occasional; they have become the seasonal rhythm of life in the north.
According to Pakistan’s Ministry of Climate Change, more than 3,000 glacial lakes have formed across Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) as glaciers retreat, with 33 formally assessed as prone to hazardous glacial lake outburst flooding (GLOF). More than 7.1 million people across the two regions live within reach of that risk, per the same ministry. Pakistan’s Space Agency (Suparco), which monitors these lakes by satellite for the ministry’s GLOF Technical Committee, has recently expanded its watch list to 131 potentially dangerous lakes nationwide. This is not a distant or abstract threat; it is a documented, monitored, escalating one.
Climate change is the underlying driver, but several man-made factors are actively accelerating GB’s exposure to disaster. GB’s building landscape has changed dramatically in a single generation. In Skardu city alone, nearly 50,000 traditional mud houses, which naturally regulated indoor temperature, have been replaced by concrete structures that absorb and radiate heat, according to local academics cited by Dawn. Much of this construction has expanded with tourism revenue and political patronage rather than environmental planning, often built directly along riverbanks and floodplains without hazard-zone assessment.
Deforestation, meanwhile, is concentrated in Diamer district, which has become the epicentre of GB’s forest crisis. The Diamer Forest Working Plan, covering 122,863 acres across six forest ranges, has faced repeated violations serious enough that the Senate Sub-Committee on Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan recently ordered a suspension of all timber transit permits pending inspection. Illegal logging, often carried out under legal cover, according to Pamir Times reporting, has stripped slopes of the vegetation that would otherwise anchor soil and absorb rainfall, directly increasing landslide and flash-flood risk. Deforestation rates in GB rise roughly tenfold in winter, as firewood and timber are cut and transported for heating, cooking and construction.
Compounding this, Pakistan has no standalone federal or provincial department focused specifically on glacier monitoring and protection, despite being the country most exposed to GLOF risk on Earth. In GB, environmental regulation is handled by the GB Environmental Protection Agency (GB-EPA), but GB-EPA is not an independent department; it operates as an attached wing under the Forest, Wildlife & Environment Department, competing for funding, staffing and policy priority with forestry and wildlife functions rather than operating as a specialised authority with its own mandate and enforcement power.
With no reliable alternative heating source in the harshest winters, some residents burn plastic tyres alongside firewood, producing dense smog and toxic particulate pollution, as documented in regional reporting on GB’s deforestation and air-quality crisis. A GB-EPA climate strategy report confirms that firewood and fuel combustion, alongside vehicle emissions, are the region’s leading sources of greenhouse gas output. GB residents also face up to 18–20 hours of daily load-shedding in winter, according to multiple local reports, despite the region’s enormous hydropower potential. Deprived of consistent grid electricity, households and businesses turn to diesel generators, kerosene lanterns and firewood; solutions that compound the very emissions problem driving glacier melt in the first place. Adding to this, GB has no adequate municipal solid waste disposal infrastructure across most of its districts; waste is routinely burned in the open, adding to air pollution and depositing black carbon on nearby glacier surfaces, a substance known to accelerate ice melt by darkening the surface and reducing its ability to reflect sunlight.
None of these stays confined to the mountains. Gilgit-Baltistan’s glaciers are often called Pakistan’s “water towers” for good reason: they feed the Indus River system that irrigates Punjab and Sindh and underpins the country’s entire agricultural economy. The Jaglot-Skardu Road (JSR), the single primary route connecting Baltistan Division to the rest of Gilgit-Baltistan and the country, has been repeatedly severed by flash floods, landslides and GLOF-related debris, including as recently as this July, when floodwaters cut off Skardu, Ghanche, Shigar and Astore from the rest of the region for days, damaging multiple bridges and stranding residents and tourists alike. This is not an isolated event: the same road has been blocked by landslides and flooding on a near-annual basis in recent years, underscoring how a single point of failure can isolate an entire division.
Agriculture is paying a parallel price, especially GB’s signature dry fruit economy. Gilgit-Baltistan is Pakistan’s largest apricot-producing region, cultivating roughly 6,170 hectares and producing over 60,000 tonnes annually, a crop that ranks as GB’s second-largest cash crop after seed potato and sustains thousands of farming households. Roughly 80 percent of GB’s population depends on subsistence farming. Unseasonal snowfall and untimely rains are now damaging apricot, cherry and almond blossoms before they can set fruit, shorten growing seasons and shrink yields, a pattern local agriculture officials attribute directly to shifting precipitation timing and intensity. ICIMOD, the leading intergovernmental research body for the wider Hindu Kush Himalaya region, has warned that GB and similar high-altitude zones must now prepare for compound hazards, heavy rainfall, glacier melt, unstable slopes and rapidly rising rivers occurring together rather than as isolated events, making disaster response planning far more complex than treating floods, GLOFs and landslides as separate risks.
None of this is beyond fixing, but it requires deliberate, long-term investment alongside urgent short-term action. On the long-term side, GB’s hydropower potential, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 megawatts, almost entirely untapped, could be developed through public-private partnership financing, resolving the region’s own chronic power crisis while making it a net contributor to the national grid; the scale of investment required makes PPP-based development far more realistic than reliance on federal budgets alone. A dedicated Glacier Protection and Research Department is also overdue, separate from existing disaster and forestry bodies, with its own budget, technical staff and a clear mandate for glacier monitoring, GLOF research, and coordination with international bodies such as ICIMOD and Suparco. GB-EPA itself should be elevated to full departmental status, independent of the Forest, Wildlife & Environment Department, with enforcement powers, dedicated staffing, and authority equal to any other line department, rather than functioning as a subordinate wing competing for attention with forestry and wildlife management.
In the short term, an outright ban on tyre burning and other toxic solid-fuel combustion for heating is needed, alongside emissions restrictions on heavy industry and construction activity contributing to regional air pollution and black carbon deposition on glaciers. Deforestation needs an effective, monitored ban with real consequences for violations of the Diamer Forest Working Plan and similar frameworks elsewhere in GB. The region’s government should formally declare an environmental emergency across Gilgit-Baltistan, unlocking emergency funding and inter-agency coordination mechanisms, and make GB-EPA approval a mandatory, non-bypass able step for all new infrastructure and construction projects. Community-based disaster preparedness training and resilience programmes should be institutionalised in every GLOF-exposed valley, building on existing GLOF-II community centres rather than treating them as one-off pilot projects, with functioning early warning and alarm systems installed and maintained in every district assessed as high-risk, not only the pilot valleys currently covered. A comprehensive survey of all glaciers and glacial lakes is also needed, classifying them into risk zones with continuous satellite and ground-based monitoring, building on Suparco’s existing lake inventory — paired with a dedicated green buffer zone programme, planting vegetation cover near the most hazardous glacial lakes and moraine dams to help absorb and slow debris flow, reducing the destructive force of any future outburst event.
Gilgit-Baltistan has spent years being written about only after the next flood, briefly, sympathetically, then forgotten until the cycle repeats. The evidence from the ministry’s own data, ICIMOD’s regional assessments, and Suparco’s satellite monitoring all point to the same conclusion: this is an accelerating, well-documented crisis, not a speculative one. What is missing is not information, it is institutional will, dedicated funding, and enforcement. Pakistan does not have the luxury of treating Gilgit-Baltistan’s glaciers as someone else’s emergency; the water and the risk both flows downstream.
The author is a Chemical Engineer from Skardu, researching how green hydrogen could power Pakistan’s industrial future. Ashiq Hussain ashiq224hussain@gmail.com
