Himalayan diplomacy: A new frontier for Pakistan–Nepal climate cooperation

Somewhere above 4,500 metres in Gilgit-Baltistan, a glacier that has fed the Indus for millennia is losing ice faster than at any point since scientists began keeping records. A thousand kilometres to the east, in the Khumbu region of Nepal, the same story is unfolding on the slopes below Everest. Two countries, separated by India’s landmass and decades of diplomatic distance, are quite literally standing on the same melting ground. It is time Islamabad and Kathmandu recognised what geography has been telling them all along: their futures are tied together by ice, water and risk, and neither can afford to keep looking at the mountains alone. The numbers are no longer abstract. Research from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the Kathmandu-based body that has monitored the Hindu Kush Himalaya for half a century, found that glaciers across the region have lost as much as 27 metres of ice thickness since 1975, with the rate of loss having doubled since the turn of the century. Pakistan alone is home to roughly 13,000 glaciers, and the Indus, the river that irrigates the bulk of Pakistani agriculture and sustains its hydropower, draws an extraordinary 70 per cent of its flow from glacier and snowmelt. Nepal’s glaciers, including the closely watched Mera and Rikha Samba, serve the same role for South Asia’s eastern river systems. When ICIMOD’s scientists call this region the “Third Pole” and the “Water Tower of Asia”, they are not being poetic. They are describing the plumbing that keeps nearly 2 billion people alive. Pakistan has already paid the price of treating this as someone else’s problem. The 2022 floods were not simply an unlucky monsoon. The country received close to 190pc of its normal July-August rainfall, with Sindh and Balochistan hit by rainfall multiples far beyond historical norms, and the result was catastrophe: over 1,700 dead, 33 million people affected, roughly a third of the country under water, and a UN-backed Po