By Syed Shamsuddin Shabbir Ahmad Dogar’s recent write-up (November 16, 2025) delivers a sobering truth: no effort to conserve Gilgit-Baltistan’s rapidly thinning forests will ever succeed unless local communities are first empowered with subsidized, reliable clean-energy alternatives. Forest bans, regulations, and awareness drives become futile when people face minus-degree winters with no option but to burn wood to survive. Dogar rightly stresses that any meaningful environmental policy must begin by removing the people’s dependency on firewood—before the situation crosses the point of no return. This warning comes at a time when climatologists forecast even more severe and unpredictable weather patterns for G-B , patterns that threaten not only local livelihoods but also Pakistan’s glacial treasure , which feeds the Indus River and sustains the entire nation’s water security. The stakes could not be higher. The Harsh Reality on ...
By Syed Shamsuddin GILGIT-BALTISTAN (G-B), with its formidable mountains and deeply incised valleys, is a land of climatic extremes—unbearable heat during the peak of summer and bone-chilling cold in winter. For centuries, communities here coped with these hardships by building dwellings from stone, clay, and timber. These traditional structures, shaped by the natural environment, provided a degree of thermal balance that made life tolerable. But the story has changed drastically. Concrete Houses, Climatic Hardship Over time, the triple forces of climate change, population growth, and land scarcity have transformed how people build their homes. With only one percent of the region under cultivation and barely another one percent habitable without mechanical intervention , families have been compelled to build compact, vertical concrete structures on whatever land is available. These cement-and-iron boxes may be efficient in terms...