In August 2025, cloudbursts tore through Kishtwar district in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir. At least 60 people were killed. More than 100 were injured. Approximately 200 went missing. Roads dissolved into rivers of mud. Bridges collapsed. Communities already living under the weight of military occupation and economic strain found themselves additionally buried under landslide debris, cut off from the outside world, waiting for help that the destroyed infrastructure could not deliver. Scientists were not surprised. They had been warning for years that the Himalayas were becoming more dangerous, more unpredictable and more lethal as the climate changed. What surprised no one who has studied Kashmir is that the people absorbing these consequences had the least role in creating them and the least capacity to survive them.

Climate change has arrived in IIoJK not as a future threat but as a present reality, compounding every existing vulnerability of a population already living under conditions of extreme political and economic fragility. The Kolahoi Glacier, the primary feeder of the Lidder River and a critical source of water for vast stretches of the Kashmir Valley, has lost more than 50 percent of its surface area since the 1960s. Satellite imagery documents its ongoing fragmentation. It is not an isolated case. Himalayan glaciers across the region have been losing mass at roughly double the rate recorded before 2000. Under current emissions trajectories, projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development suggest that between 75 and 80 percent of Hindu Kush Himalayan glacier volume could be lost by 2100. The consequences for nearly two billion people dependent on these water systems downstream are already being modelled by scientists and already being felt by farmers in Kashmir’s fields.

The hydrology of Kashmir’s rivers, the Jhelum, the Lidder, the Chenab, depends on a precise seasonal rhythm of snowmelt and glacial contribution that sustains summer irrigation long after the rains have stopped. As glaciers retreat, that rhythm breaks. Initial melt acceleration produces short-term flood surges. Long-term depletion produces summer water scarcity. Kashmir’s farmers are already experiencing both within the same decade, sometimes within the same season.

Beyond the slow violence of glacial retreat, Kashmir faces the acute violence of increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events. Glacial Lake Outburst Floods, formed when proglacial lakes breach their natural ice or moraine dams, represent one of the most dangerous and least predictable consequences of accelerated melt. Himalayan glacial lake water area expanded by over nine percent between 2011 and 2025, with Indian glacial lakes alone increasing their water spread by more than 22 percent. Dozens of lakes across Jammu and Kashmir have been flagged as high-risk outburst sites by monitoring authorities.

The 2025 Kishtwar floods demonstrated what happens when these risks materialise in a territory with inadequate disaster infrastructure, restricted civil society and communities already stretched to their limits. Rainfall of 380 millimetres in a single 24-hour period was recorded in Jammu. The flooding was not merely a natural disaster. It was a governance failure made inevitable by chronic underinvestment in adaptation infrastructure, by the prioritisation of military and connectivity projects over community resilience, and by the political marginalisation of the very communities most exposed to these risks.

What makes climate change in IIoJK uniquely devastating is that it does not arrive in isolation. It falls upon a population already burdened by militarization, economic disruption, land insecurity, and restricted civic agency. Kashmir’s farmers, whose livelihoods depend on glacier-fed irrigation for apples, saffron, paddy, and maize, now confront a dual crisis: the long-term depletion of water sources through glacial retreat and the immediate destruction of crops through floods, landslides, and erratic snowfall. Districts such as Kupwara, Bandipora, and Kulgam have repeatedly been identified among the most climate-vulnerable areas in the region.

Kashmir’s saffron cultivation, one of its most economically and culturally significant agricultural practices, has sharply declined due to changing precipitation patterns and warmer winters. Wular Lake, a Ramsar Convention-designated wetland and vital ecological buffer for the Valley, faces declining water levels and deteriorating quality under changing hydrological conditions. These are not abstract environmental indicators; they signify the erosion of the material and cultural foundations of Kashmiri life.

International environmental and human rights law places clear obligations on states administering territories to protect civilian populations from foreseeable harm, including climate-related harm. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction calls for investment in resilience, early warning systems, and adaptation infrastructure proportionate to known risks. Likewise, the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation highlighted the cascading consequences of cryosphere loss for mountain communities. Yet the governance gap remains stark. Communities affected by the 2025 floods reported inadequate warnings, delayed relief due to damaged routes, and limited district-level adaptation planning. Where communities cannot freely organize or advocate, climate vulnerability deepens into structural insecurity.

The glaciers of the Himalayas do not recognise the political boundaries that divide their meltwater between nations and territories. But the consequences of their retreat fall with brutal precision on the most vulnerable communities in the region. In IIoJK, a population already living under conditions of political suppression, economic fragility and legal marginalisation now faces the additional burden of a rapidly destabilising climate for which it bears no meaningful responsibility.

The author is a student of International Relations at the Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan. Currently, he is serving as an intern at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations Islamabad. He can be reached at zeryabkhan39@gmail.com