Glaciers, Gatekeepers, and Silence: The Hidden Battle for Climate Truth in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan

By Nadia Zartaj

Reporting on the climate in Pakistan’s extreme north is no longer just a professional challenge; it is a battle against geography, institutional opacity, and systemic neglect.
Gilgit-Baltistan is where the world’s three greatest mountain ranges the Karakoram, the Himalayas, and the Hindukush converge in one of the most dramatic and consequential landscapes on Earth. It is home to K2, the world’s second-highest peak and a mountain so severe it claims roughly one in four of those who attempt its summit without supplemental oxygen. It contains more glaciers than anywhere outside the polar regions a frozen reservoir of freshwater so vast it feeds the Indus River, which in turn sustains the drinking water, agriculture, and survival of nearly 300 million people across Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. Gilgit-Baltistan is not a remote corner of the world. It is one of the planet’s most essential water towers and it is in crisis.
These glaciers, which cover roughly 30 percent of GB’s total area, are disappearing fast, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The human cost is stark: more than 7.1 million people are at risk from glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) the violent, unpredictable torrents that occur when meltwater breaches a glacial lake. Over 3,000 glacial lakes have been identified in GB and neighbouring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with 33 classified as highly dangerous under Pakistan’s GLOF-II initiative, a joint project of the UNDP and the Government of Pakistan Ministry of Climate Change designed to install early warning systems and protect mountain communities.
The crisis is intensifying. In 2025, temperatures in Chilas a city situated within GB’s mountain terrain soared to a record 48.5°C, an extraordinary anomaly for a high-altitude region, according to the Pakistan Meteorological Department, confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization. Beyond rising temperatures, erratic rainfall is triggering more frequent flash floods and landslides, destroying infrastructure and threatening livelihoods, as highlighted in reports by the National Disaster Management Authority and the World Bank.
The region’s vulnerability is compounded by its fragile economy. More than 80 percent of GB’s population depends on subsistence farming, yet only about two percent of the land is cultivable, according to data from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics and the Food and Agriculture Organization. And despite contributing less than one percent to global greenhouse gas emissions, Pakistan remains among the countries most severely affected by climate change, according to the World Bank and the Global Carbon Project.
For journalists, this makes Gilgit-Baltistan not just a critical story, but a dangerous one requiring reporting from remote, disaster-prone terrain where physical risks are high, as documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists.
The first hurdle is the land itself. The compound topography of GB characterized by sheer vertical terrain and violently unpredictable weather often turns environmental stories into no-go zones. As Nadeem Khan, senior journalist and Chief Reporter for Khyber News with 20 years of regional experience, describes it: “The biggest challenge is accessing remote, rugged areas. Many affected areas are cut off, making it tough to reach. Sometimes journalists risk their lives to report from floods and landslides just to highlight ground realities.”
Even when the terrain is navigable, the data often is not. Environmental oversight in GB rests largely with the Gilgit-Baltistan Environmental Protection Agency (GB-EPA), which is responsible both for approving projects and for reporting on them a structural conflict of interest that critics argue limits independent accountability. Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) are legally required under GB’s Environmental Protection framework, but public access remains severely limited. A review of the GB-EPA’s official website conducted on June 13, 2026, using search terms including “EIA repository,” “Environmental Impact Assessment,” and “Publications,” found that while the agency maintains landing pages for “EIAs” and “IEE/EIA Regulations” (such as the uploaded ‘GB EPA Regulations IEE and EIA 2024’), the public folder contains zero actual impact reports for 2025–2026 infrastructure projects. Instead, the site only provides outdated text or localized water-quality research papers from previous years. Furthermore, although the agency announced public hearings via short notice notices—such as a September 2025 hearing for a 200-bed Treasury Care Hospital—the full EIAs themselves are completely missing from the portal. No formal Right to Information (RTI) application has been processed for these missing archives at the time of publication, tracking a broader regional pattern of data opacity where public requests traditionally bypass statutory 14-to-21 day legal response windows.
Journalist Manzar Shigri, who has been investigating the region’s ongoing droughts, has encountered this data scarcity first-hand: “Collecting data has been challenging due to a lack of reliable information. I struggled to find accurate data on carbon emissions from vehicles and wood burning. The Right to Information Act isn’t effectively implemented, making it difficult to access data from government or private organizations.” Without credible, independently verifiable scientific data, reporters are forced to rely on unverified accounts, stripping their reports of the investigative force needed to hold institutions to account.
Reporting from the Rubble
This institutional silence is most dangerous during natural disasters. Climate journalist Shireen Karim, who has been covering the region since 2015, describes how the absence of formal media integration into government early warning systems pushes journalists into a reactive, documentation-only role. Rather than disseminating life-saving alerts in real time, reporters arrive after the destruction is already complete to count the dead, not warn the living. Karim points directly to institutional silos during sudden-onset disasters, such as the major Hispar Glacier lake alert in early June 2026. “When a glacial lake reaches critical pressure, the early warnings are treated strictly as an internal administrative chain—moving from automated sensors to the PMD, then to District Disaster Management Authorities (DDMAs), and finally to local administrative officers,” Karim explains, “Journalists are systematically bypassed. We are left out of official WhatsApp alert loops and automated administrative dashboards. For instance, when flash floods cut off remote valleys, we only find out hours or days later through chaotic social media distress calls. By the time we can safely deploy to the field or broadcast a notice, the mudslide has already buried the roads, the communication infrastructure is down, and the window for community evacuation has shut. We become chroniclers of devastation rather than partners in prevention.”
This exclusion is codified by the operational architecture of the National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP) and regional standard operating procedures (SOPs). These frameworks classify independent media outlets strictly as “public awareness tools” to be utilized after a disaster is declared, rather than integrating local press clubs as real-time nodes within the automated Early Warning System (EWS) dissemination protocol.
“Local journalists often lack access to climate experts and data, making fact-based reporting difficult,” Karim says. “Many self-proclaimed experts lack basic understanding, and climate stories are often underreported due to security and financial constraints.”
The consequences of institutional secrecy are particularly evident in the GLOF-II project. Launched as a joint initiative of the United Nations Development Programme and the Government of Pakistan’s Ministry of Climate Change, GLOF-II was designed to shield mountain communities from glacial lake outburst floods by installing sensor networks, training local first responders, and building real-time early warning infrastructure across GB and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Billions of rupees were allocated for this purpose. But the project has become a focal point for allegations of serious financial mismanagement.
In the Gilgit-Baltistan Assembly, lawmakers raised alarms that funds designated for critical flood sensors were squandered on what they described as a “seminar culture” of luxury workshops. These sweeping allegations of financial misappropriation were formally brought to the assembly floor. Lawmakers Javed Ali Manwa and Sadia Danish alleged that while flood-affected communities volunteered to restore their own irrigation channels, project resources were distributed among politically favoured recipients.
Countering Disinformation in Climate Crises
The urgency of Pakistan’s climate crisis is being compounded by a secondary, largely invisible threat: a surge of disinformation triggered by the climate events themselves. According to the 2025 report “Climate Disinformation in Pakistan: Silencing Indigenous Peoples’ Voice, an estimated 95 percent of climate-related falsehoods circulate during high-impact events such as floods and heatwaves. The report finds that by amplifying narratives of religious fatalism and conspiracy, disinformation does more than confuse the public it actively delegitimizes Indigenous knowledge systems and excludes the country’s most vulnerable communities from the policy decisions that most affect them. The authors argue that “information integrity” must be treated as a core pillar of national climate security.
Frontline Without Support: The Economic and Gender Barriers to Climate Reporting
Climate journalism is expensive by nature. Unlike a political speech or a court verdict, a climate story cannot be covered in a single visit. A journalist investigating a glacial lake must travel to terrain that may be days from the nearest road. A reporter examining the failure of an early warning system must file information requests, await responses, cross-reference data, and return to the story over months often without any guarantee that an editor will run the final piece. The infrastructure required for this work transport, equipment, safety gear, scientific expertise far exceeds what local newsrooms in GB can afford. This is why climate stories are systematically underreported: not because they lack importance, but because they cost more than the institutions covering them can sustain.
This pressure is felt most acutely by women journalists. Shireen Karim, recently elected as Vice President of the Gilgit Union of Journalists, has described how female reporters in GB navigate a set of barriers that extend well beyond those shared with their male counterparts: cultural expectations that restrict independent travel to remote sites, safety concerns that become acute when reporting alone in disaster zones, and a pay disparity that leaves women with fewer resources to pursue long-form investigations. These barriers systematically bury critical environmental angles. For example, local climate filmmaker and journalist Sehrish Kanwal has highlighted how independent travel restrictions prevent women from accessing remote, high-altitude disaster sites like the upper valleys of Hunza or Ghizer without a male relative or a heavily funded media crew—luxury resources that regional stringers are rarely afforded. Consequently, vital humanitarian stories go completely untold.
According to regional field assessments, a major climate story concerning massive post-flood forced migration and domestic displacement in villages like Sherqilla went severely undercovered because local social conservative norms barred male journalists from interviewing displaced women inside temporary shelters. Because female journalists could not secure the independent transport or safe lodging required to reach the area, the specific economic devastation faced by female subsistence farmers, who manage the region’s household water collection and food security remained completely invisible to national media lines.
“Without financial and professional protections,” Karim has noted, “women’s perspectives crucial for understanding community-level climate impacts remain sidelined.” The communities most vulnerable to flooding and food insecurity in GB are often those where women manage water collection, food storage, and household disaster response. Reporting that excludes female journalists therefore risks excluding the very voices that can illuminate the human cost of the crisis most clearly.
What Needs to Change
The journalists who cover this crisis have a clear-eyed sense of what it would take to do the work properly. Nadeem Khan, who has spent two decades reporting from GB’s mountain terrain, argues that the most immediate need is practical: specialized training in climate science and risk-sensitive reporting, combined with modern equipment including drones capable of surveying flood-affected terrain that is otherwise inaccessible and proper safety gear for journalists covering active disaster zones.
Khan also points to the need for institutional transparency: a mandatory, publicly accessible registry for all Environmental Impact Assessments and project data would, he argues, fundamentally alter the relationship between journalists and the agencies they are trying to hold to account.
Shireen Karim emphasizes that financial and professional protections for investigative reporters are not peripheral concerns they are prerequisites for the kind of journalism that can expose mismanagement and save lives. Without safety mechanisms and fair pay, reporters who risk retaliation for uncovering institutional failures have no backstop.
The environmental crisis in Gilgit-Baltistan is not a distant threat it is a present reality, unfolding faster than the institutions designed to document it can keep pace. If the journalists of this region remain under-resourced and silenced by bureaucracy, the full scale of GB’s ecological transformation will only become visible when it is too late to act. Treating environmental reporting as a niche beat, in a region that holds the water future of hundreds of millions of people, is not a matter of editorial preference. It is a matter of survival.

Nadia Zartaj is an independent documentary filmmaker and journalist from Gilgit-Baltistan. Her work focuses on climate change, women’s empowerment, and social issues.
Email: nadiazartaj@gmail.com