When the Mountains Stop Giving: Climate Change, Cherries, and Trout in Gilgit-Baltistan
In Hunza, cherry season used to be a celebration. Farmers who had tended their orchards through long, bitter winters would watch the blossoms appear in April and know that the harvest and the income it brought was coming. In GB’s crystal-clear rivers, trout moved through cold, oxygen-rich water in patterns that fishermen had understood for generations. Both were more than economic activities. They were the rhythm of mountain life.
That rhythm is breaking.
Gilgit-Baltistan is among the most ecologically extraordinary and climate-vulnerable regions on earth. Situated among the Hindu Kush, Karakoram, and Himalayan mountain ranges, the region is home to some of the largest glaciers outside the polar regions. Rising temperatures accelerate glacial melt, leading to increased Glacial Lake Outburst Floods, which pose significant risks to local communities. Research shows that temperatures are rising at twice the rate of the plains. The agricultural sector a lifeline for more than 80% of the population is struggling to cope, with only 2% of GB’s total area being cultivable land, now increasingly threatened by changing weather patterns.
In 2025 alone, the region experienced record-breaking heatwaves. A staggering 48.5°C was recorded in Chilas and 46.1°C in Bonji on July 5th a profound anomaly for a region that has historically functioned on the cold rhythms of high-altitude mountain ecology. These numbers are not weather statistics. They are obituaries for an agricultural system that cannot survive the heat it was never designed to absorb.
The Cherry Crisis
Gilgit-Baltistan’s cherries are among Pakistan’s most distinctive agricultural products exported nationally and increasingly sought internationally, forming a critical income source for thousands of small farmers. But the cherry is a precise fruit. It requires a specific number of cold hours in winter what agronomists call “chilling hours” to break dormancy and flower properly. Studies confirm that climate change has badly affected the ecosystem and ecology of cherry species, with research covering 1952 to 2025 documenting how variable climatic conditions in Pakistan have significantly disrupted cherry growth and production performance.
Flash floods have wreaked havoc across Gilgit-Baltistan, damaging standing crops and orchards full of cherry and apricot trees. Farmers in Nagar district have observed a marked decline in the production of crops and horticultural products due to climate-induced diseases disruptions that compound year after year without institutional support or adaptation frameworks.
When early frost strikes after blossoms have already opened a pattern increasingly common as seasonal timing becomes unpredictable an entire year’s harvest is lost overnight. When flash floods carry away the soil of terraced orchards built across generations, they carry away something that cannot simply be replanted. The cherry crisis in GB is not a bad season. It is a structural unravelling of agricultural systems that have no climate adaptation framework to fall back on.
The Trout in Trouble
The rivers of Gilgit-Baltistan fed by glacier melt, cold, fast-moving, rich in oxygen have long been among Pakistan’s finest habitats for trout. Trout farming grew into a significant economic sector. That sector is now collapsing. Gilgit-Baltistan’s trout population has declined by an estimated 50% over the past two decades, with officials and experts blaming climate-related floods, habitat damage, and overfishing.
“Climate change-induced flash floods have been destroying spawning habitats of trout in most streams and tributaries by changing sediments and gravel size,” said Farasat Ali of WWF Pakistan. Trout need clean, oxygen-rich water, while floods and landslides bring mud and rocks that degrade water quality and destroy breeding sites.
The economic damage is severe and cascading. Pakistan’s trout farming industry is on the verge of collapse due to climate change. The 2022 floods wiped out hundreds of farms, with losses estimated at PKR 2.58 billion. Before floods, trout sold at PKR 800 per kilogram. Post-flood shortages have driven prices to PKR 3,500 per kilogram widening the gap between demand and supply in a market that can no longer reliably produce.
Increasing temperatures, uneven turbidity, and contamination in water bodies are critically impacting trout fish. GLOF is an emerging threat to livelihoods in the fisheries sector. Hydropower plants built without fish ladders block trout movement upstream to breed wiping out entire offspring populations within affected habitats.
The Compounding Injustice
What makes this crisis particularly devastating is its intersection with an already fragile socioeconomic context. Communities of GB contribute less than 1% to global CO₂ and greenhouse gas emissions, yet face the greatest consequences. Poor government response, limited resources, low financial capacity, and lack of infrastructure fuel hardships that compound with every new climate event.
Cherry farmers who lose their harvest have no crop insurance, no emergency relief mechanism, and no alternative income pathway. Trout farmers whose ponds are destroyed by floods face debts they cannot repay. The women who dry and process cherries for domestic markets lose seasonal income that entire household budgets depend on. These losses are not captured in Pakistan’s national climate accounts. They are absorbed silently by communities with no other option.
What Must Change
Three interventions are urgent. First, GB’s cherry orchards require a climate-adaptive horticulture programme varietal trials for heat-tolerant cultivars, frost protection infrastructure, and training for farmers on changing seasonal management practices. This exists nowhere in current government programming.
Second, trout farming must be supported with climate-resilient infrastructure fish ladders on hydropower projects, regulated breeding season protections, and emergency support mechanisms for farms destroyed by floods. The GB Fisheries Department is chronically underfunded relative to the scale of the problem it is being asked to manage.
Third, and most fundamentally, the GB Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan, revised in 2023, must be translated from a policy document into operational reality with adequate financial resources, cross-departmental coordination, and genuine engagement with farming and fishing communities whose knowledge of these ecosystems is more detailed than any government database.
The glaciers of Gilgit-Baltistan have sustained civilisations for millennia. The cherries have fed families and funded children’s educations for generations. The trout have moved through these rivers in patterns older than any policy framework. What is being lost here is not just agricultural output. It is a way of living, built across centuries in one of the world’s most extraordinary landscapes, being undone in a single generation by a crisis the people of GB did not cause and are not equipped to face alone.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Opinion Desk.
