by Fazal Saadi
For the past one-month, torrential rains and flash-floods continue to ravage Gilgit-Baltistan. More than 15 people have lost their lives and many more displaced and devastated. From Ghizer to Baltistan, Diamer to Gojal, Astore to Chitral glacial lake outbursts floods (GLOFs) continue to wreak havoc.
Across the region, widespread damages to settlements, livelihoods, roads, and essential infrastructure, including communication, electricity, and water supply, has severed links between villages, valleys and the wider Gilgit-Baltistan region crippled life in the affected areas and making survival increasingly difficult.
The most affected valleys are Ishkoman, Gupis and Yasin in Ghizer; Ghuwari, Baghicha, Hushey and Skardu in Baltistan; Danyore Haramosh and Bagrote in Gilgit Division; Hoper Nager; Gulmit, Shimshal, Chipursan and Sost in Gojal; Hasanabad, Murtazabad, and Altit in central Hunza; Thak Nullah, and Bunerdas in Diamer Division, and Astor district where cloudburst and floods have killed 15 people and left many injured and displaced.
In Dain, Asumbar and Chatorkhand and Khalti valleys four people including children and women have been killed. More than 10,000 residents have lost links with rest of the region after the historic Dain bridge in Ishkoman was swept away by the flooded river severing vital links to markets, hospitals, and schools.
The ferocious floods damaged houses, shops, a mosque, a Jamaat Khana, irrigation channels, drinking water systems standing crops, fruit orchards, forest trees, and link roads, leaving people without food supplies or fodder for livestock.
Now question arises: who bears responsibility for this situation? Gilgit-Baltistan’s share in carbon emissions is negligible, yet it remains one of the most climate-vulnerable regions frequently devastated by glacial lake outburst floods, landslides, avalanches and climate-induced disasters. This is climate injustice in its starkest form: the global imperialist powers – the primary drivers of global warming — have built their wealth and empires on the relentless exploitation of fossil fuels and natural resources of the colonised regions in South Asia, Africa, Latin America and beyond and also stockpiling weapons and fostering chemical industries. Marginalised communities in the global South pay the price in lives lost, livelihoods destroyed, and futures stigmatised.
This current devastation in Gilgit-Baltistan is not a “natural disaster” or divine wreath; it is a man-made catastrophe. It is the predictable outcome of over seven decades of systemic neglect, structural inequality, and political disenfranchisement.
Gilgit-Baltistan, to this day, has been denied constitutional, democratic and fundamental rights, representation in Parliament of Pakistan and other constitutional forums. Neither it has a constituent assembly nor an independent judiciary. The region is being governed through a bureaucratic colonial system. Since 2005, there has been no functional local government, depriving the 2.2 million people of the ability to plan, manage, and implement their development priorities. The toothless, powerless provincial government has no authority over legislation, resources, let alone disaster preparedness and is widely regarded as one of the most inefficient hybrid government.
This reality can be gauged from the fact that while people are struggling for survival and coping with the crisis, the Chief Minister and his advisers and cabinet members are busy with foreign tours.
So far, no significant relief from the federal and provincial governments as well as NGOs or organisations mandated to respond to disasters. Instead, the first and crucial wave of rescue and relief has fallen entirely on local volunteers, many of them young men risking their lives without proper training, equipment or institutional support. Just last week, nine such volunteers lost their lives in Danyore, on the outskirts of Gilgit, while attempting to restore a damaged water supply system. Their sacrifice is a tragic reminder of the unbearable burden local communities are compelled to shoulder when the state fails and abdicates its responsibility.
Adding to this neglect is a troubling media pattern: corporate mainstream media seldom report on the hardships and losses endured by the people of Gilgit-Baltistan, preferring instead to showcase postcard images of its lofty mountains, lakes, and valleys. While the region’s beauty is undeniable, such selective storytelling romanticises the region’s landscape while erasing the people’s daily struggles, ensuring that its crises remain invisible to much of the world.
Meanwhile, unregulated tourism, deforestation, haphazard construction of hotels, markets and residential houses, combined with mounting population pressures, are placing unprecedented strain on already fragile mountain ecosystems.
Decades of neglect and underinvestment have left roads and bridges so vulnerable that a single floods or avalanches could bring them down. Even when climate finance does arrive, it is often absorbed into federal budgets and rarely reaches the communities most in need, pushing those already vulnerable deeper into poverty.
The vicious cycle is painfully all too familiar: floods devastate lives, aid arrives late or in token amounts, headlines fade, and nothing truly changes. Breaking this vicious cycle demands more than temporary relief. The state must uphold its constitutional responsibility by recognising food, water, energy, mobility and the protection of life as fundamental rights, not as market commodities left to individuals or private entities.
Climate finance should be directed as community-based grants and structured through debt-for-adaptation swaps, at local level ensuring that vulnerable communities are not forced to pay for a crisis they did not create. It can be used to strengthen local governance, prepare trained rescue teams, establish early warning system, protect and purify water sources, document damage to make relief claims stronger and transparent, and build cooperatives to strengthen livelihoods.
Over the longer term, it demands a well-equipped local government and communities to develop disaster management plans, restore degraded ecosystems, strictly oversee infrastructure safety and quality. But most importantly, it requires decision-making powers in the hands of local people to plan, decide and act, backed by a truly representative effective local government system.
Local people must also take organised collective action, demanding constitutional recognition and pushing for restoration of the Local Government institution for empowered governance.
The floods devastation in Gilgit-Baltistan and its neighbouring Chitral, Buner, and beyond are not isolated misfortunes. They are the outcome of a global order that enriches a few and abandons vulnerable marginalised communities to bear the crisis. Unless this structure changes, locally and globally, the next disaster is not a distant possibility, but an inevitability waiting for the next season.
Fazal Saadi, from Ishkoman, is a development practitioner and researcher whose work focuses on the poverty and inequality challenges generated by development processes.
The High Asia Herald is a member of High Asia Media Group — a window to High Asia and Central Asia