By Zarina Ashraf
Ask an elder in Khaplu what has changed in the last twenty years, and they will not only talk about the weather. They will talk about houses that used to breathe with the cold and now trap it wrong. About food that used to come from the field and now comes from a shop. About a language their grandchildren can speak but cannot write. Ice is not the only thing disappearing in Gilgit-Baltistan. A way of life built specifically for this land is disappearing with it and the two losses are not separate stories. They are the same story.
Why Culture and Environment Are Never Really Separate
There is a simple idea in anthropology that explains a lot here: culture is not something people carry on top of their environment. It grows out of it. The wood-and-stone houses in Baltistan were not built that way by accident, thick stone walls and wood insulation were the local answer to brutal winters, long before anyone had heard the word “insulation.” The underground shelter called “Kacha” was not tradition for tradition’s sake; it was a practical way to survive extreme cold using less fuel. The crops grown in these valleys wheat, barley, buckwheat were chosen because they could survive the altitude and the short growing season. Even the Balti language carries knowledge in it: words for snow conditions, water flow, and seasonal change that outsiders simply do not have names for.
In other words, culture in a place like Gilgit-Baltistan is a survival manual passed down through generations. It tells people how to build, what to eat, and how to organise their lives around a difficult environment. When that manual gets thrown out, the people lose more than tradition. They lose the tools that made living here possible.
What Is Actually Happening
GB holds the largest number of glaciers outside the polar regions, and these glaciers feed the Indus the river that irrigates Punjab and Sindh. When people in GB talk about melting glaciers, they are talking about a crisis for the whole country, not just their valley. Along with parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the region has over 7,000 glaciers and more than 3,000 sites at risk of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods
At the same time, roads and tourism have connected these valleys to the rest of Pakistan and the world. That connection brought income, but it also brought a fast, quiet swap of the old survival manual for a new one borrowed from elsewhere.
In 2018, I studied this exact shift in Khaplu Valley. The numbers were clear. Only 56 percent of households still lived in traditional wood-and-stone homes; the rest had already moved to cement and tile, materials that were never designed for this climate. Only 38 percent still used the Kacha in winter. Only 24 percent still grew their own vegetables, the remaining 76 percent now depend on the market. And while 88 percent of people still spoke Balti, only 2 percent could read or write it. Interestingly, 80 percent of the people I surveyed said they were against this cultural change. But 100 percent agreed that new technology was the reason it was happening anyway. People saw what they were losing, and adopted the change regardless, because it was easier and carried more status than the old way.
Why This Makes Climate Change Worse, Not Separate From It
Here is the part we usually miss: the environmental crisis and the cultural shift are feeding each other.
Cement construction traps heat differently than stone and wood, and it was never suited to this terrain or climate. Roads and hotels built for tourism have changed how water drains through these valleys, some of the same valleys now seeing more flash floods and GLOF events. And when families no longer grow their own food, a single blocked road or damaged irrigation channel after a flood can turn into a food shortage, something a self-sufficient household could have withstood a generation ago.
This is what researchers call a “threat multiplier.” Climate change does not act alone. It lands on top of communities that have already given up the very systems that once made them resilient. A household that still grows its own grain, builds with local material, and remembers how past generations handled a hard winter has more to fall back on than one that now depends on cement, imported food, and a good tourist season.
What Local Communities Can Actually Do
Policy from Islamabad matters, but much of the real work must happen inside these valleys, led by the people who live there.
Communities do not need to reject modern life to protect themselves, they need to be more thoughtful about what they keep and what they let go. Traditional building methods, local food growing, and inherited knowledge of the land were not backward habits; they were tools built for survival in a difficult place, and some of that wisdom is worth holding on to even as life modernizes. A household that grows some of its own food, builds with materials suited to the local climate, and passes down its language and its memory of the land is simply better prepared for a harder future than one that has given all of that up for convenience.
Local knowledge of weather patterns, flood behavior, and safe building should be treated as seriously as outside expertise, not replaced by it. And development itself, especially tourism-driven construction, needs to be approached with more caution, so that growth does not come at the cost of the very land and water systems these communities depend on.
None of these means turning away from progress. It means making sure that progress does not erase the things that once made these communities resilient in the first place.
Gilgit-Baltistan’s glaciers are melting because of the global crisis nobody in these valleys causes. But the loss of the local knowledge that once helped people survive, here is a choice being made every day, one cement wall and one abandoned Kacha at a time. The ice cannot be brought back. The rest still can.
Note: Field data cited in this piece is drawn from the author’s published research, Ashraf, Z. (2018). “Risk of Deprivation of Local Culture in Tourism Destination: A Case of Khaplu Valley.” Global Sociological Review, III(I), 10–17.
