By Ali Rehmat China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has strengthened decades-old Sino-Pak economic relations. The $60 billion CPEC project is part of the $5 trillion One Belt One Road (OBOR) that China considers as ‘project of the century’. OBOR links 68 countries and facilitates trade and connectivity in Asia, Europe, and Africa through mega projects of roads, bridges, energy, ports, railways …

The case of Gilgit-Baltistan is a clear manifestation of the failure of the political imagination of Pakistan’s ruling class by Aziz Ali-Dad Just seven months before his death, the iconic fiction writer of Urdu literature, Saadat Hasan Manto wrote a short story titled Gilgit Khan on June 4, 1954. It is a story of Hamza Khan who comes to a city from …

The cryosphere thinning results in the loss of rare species and their habitats, changes in infrastructure, food, and water: Dr Sitara Parveen Herald Report The thinning of the cryosphere is a major threat to the livelihoods of the mountain communities in north-western Himalaya, Trans-Himalaya, the Karakoram, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. There is a need for adaptive strategies to cope …

    Herald Report Conservationists, ecologists, and environmentalists have called for enhanced efforts and awareness about the impact of climate change on snow leopard and its habitat. The impact of climate change, unmanaged tourism, and human development have affected the snow leopard and its fragile ecosystem, they noted while speaking at different events organized by the Snow Leopard Foundation (SLF) …

By Shafqat Aziz By leaving the posh but artificial localities of Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan, and travelling almost 200km towards the north, you enter a new land now known as Gilgit-Baltistan. It’s a land full of natural marvels, highest mountains of the world, the splendid glaciers, breathtaking rivers and hills and plains habitats of many of the world’s …

  By Kamran Karim  The photographic journey offers a space for observers to create their own world of imagination and fascination. We always tend to subsume or embrace new ideas and intuition to come up with new marvels. Anticipation is a part of the processing vision of abstract. It is not just a visible world; encircling signs and dotes with …

The Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) has been helping communities create safe and resilient human habitats, with improved services in areas where they could see a future for themselves with focus on programmes related to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Herald Report The climate change caused by global heating and overexploitation of resources by corporate greed have put the existence …

The current job market in tourism and hospitality sectors is typically patriarchal and deeply misogynistic and needs to be diversified with creation of equal opportunities and a conducive environment for women, says researcher and academic Isam Shaista Khan Herald Report Tourism and hospitality sectors have witnessed rapid growth in Gilgit-Baltistan during the last five years. Tourism, according to the UN and …

Women in Pakistan sew sanitary pads to break period taboo for girls BOONI (Chitral): Bent over her hand-crank sewing machine, Hajra Bibi stitches sanitary pads for the women of her mountainous village in northwestern Pakistan, one of many rural areas in the deeply conservative country where periods are still taboo. “I am responding to a crisis,” said the 35-year-old mother, …

The tragedy behind the lake is bigger than the landslide that created it   Haneya Zuberi Franz Kafka wrote in The Metamorphosis, “But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?” I kept thinking about what Kafka said while I was in Hunza last month. The picturesque, cascading glaciers …