Late last month, Gilgit-Baltistan’s chief minister announced that his government is weighing a new Glacier Protection Authority and asked vice chancellors across the region to build glaciology into their degree programmes. It was the kind of modest administrative announcement that rarely survives a news cycle.
Buried in that announcement was an admission that ought to embarrass a country that has spent the past three years pleading its case at COP summits as one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable states: Pakistan’s single largest reservoir of frozen freshwater, the asset underwriting its entire Indus basin economy, is still managed without a dedicated protection authority and without the accounting framework that would let anyone put a defensible number on what it is worth. A region that sits on one of the densest concentrations of ice on Earth outside the poles remains, in economic terms, invisible.
That is not for lack of trying to measure it. A recent natural capital accounting analysis of GB, drawing on the Glacier and Student Project run jointly by EvK2CNR and the GB government’s own environmental protection agency, university researchers and the Pakistan Meteorological Department, valued the region’s hidden annual contribution at roughly Rs2.7 trillion or $9 billion per year.
That project has now documented some 8,400 glaciers across the territory. Water regulation for the Indus basin alone accounts for over Rs2 trillion of that estimate. Forests and carbon sequestration add another Rs300 billion and tourism, biodiversity and disaster mitigation services make up the rest. The authors are careful to note that the figure excludes carbon financing altogether, meaning the true number, once GB’s forests and high-altitude peatlands are priced for the carbon they hold and could sell, is almost certainly higher.
Numbers like this always deserve a measure of scepticism. Ecosystem-service valuation is an inexact science even in well-studied landscapes. A $9 billion estimate for one of Pakistan’s least-surveyed regions rests on benchmarks borrowed from frameworks such as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (THEEB) and China’s Gross Ecosystem Product, applied to a territory where ground-truthing is still thin. But even a generously rounded figure changes the argument.
It shifts the conversation from GB’s environment as scenery to GB’s environment as GDP. Rs2.7 trillion is not pocket change. It is nearly 25 times the size of GB’s entire public budget, generated for free, every year, by glaciers and forests that no ledger currently records.
The breakdown is worth sitting with. Tourism and cultural services, the scenic and heritage value that draws climbers to K2 and trekkers to the Karakoram, are estimated at over Rs150 billion annually on their own. This is roughly what the region spends on development in a good year. Biodiversity, the snow leopard, Himalayan brown bear, markhor and blue sheep populations, along with the medicinal and aromatic plants harvested from alpine pasture, adds a further Rs50 billion. Disaster mitigation, flood regulation and slope stabilisation that intact forest and wetland cover provide for free are valued at Rs200 billion. This figure that only makes sense once set against the Rs20 billion in damages the region’s floods caused in a single recent season.
Seen this way, natural capital is not a poetic abstraction. It is the line item explaining why some valleys flood catastrophically and others do not.
That is the deeper point of natural capital accounting as a discipline: it is not primarily about arriving at one headline figure, but about building the systematic tracking of glacier mass balance, forest cover and water flows that lets government link environmental change to economic planning in real time. The UN’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting exists for precisely this purpose and countries far poorer than Pakistan have adopted versions of it. China has built natural resource balance sheets and a Gross Ecosystem Product metric into its provincial accounting. Bhutan has done the same for Jigme Dorji National Park. India has begun a similar rollout.
GB already has an Environmental Protection Act, passed in 2014, and a Climate Change Strategy adopted in 2023. What it lacks is an economic valuation layer that would let those laws shape a budget or a market-based mechanism, like a payment-for-ecosystem-services scheme, that would let the region capture even a fraction of the value it generates for everyone downstream.
International climate finance has not caught up with this arithmetic either. Pakistan, as a whole, struggles to draw down the concessional and multilateral funds meant for climate-vulnerable states. This is also a point made by researchers at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), who traced the shortfall to a weak regulatory framework, a shortage of bankable projects, and thin, data-poor climate research. Within that already constrained national picture, GB’s share is smaller still.
Carbon credits look like an obvious fix for financing glacier conservation in GB, especially as forests and peatlands get priced for carbon sequestration. But the same problems blocking grant finance also block credit generation: verified baselines, continuous monitoring and clear land tenure are all missing. There’s an added complication: much of the Karakoram’s ice has been stable or even growing, a pattern known as the Karakoram Anomaly. This is unlike the retreat seen across the rest of the Himalayas. That’s good news for water security but bad news commercially, since carbon and cryosphere finance are built to pay for measurable loss, not stability.
This is where research matters and where Italy’s long involvement becomes significant. Italian scientists have worked in the region since 1954 and the EvK2CNR Committee runs one of Asia’s longest continuous high-altitude monitoring programs. Researchers from Milan universities Dr Davide Fugazza and Maurizio Gallo, working with EvK2CNR, Pakistani meteorological authorities and Karakoram International University, built the glacier inventory for Central Karakoram National Park that underpins current glacier counts. In effect, foreign doctoral research is building the technical foundation that GB’s own institutions have not developed.
That should concern policymakers more than it does. A region cannot permanently outsource the baseline science its climate finance claims depend on and foreign researchers eventually leave, taking institutional memory with them unless arrangements are made otherwise. The proposed Glacier Protection Authority is a start, but needs a formal data-sharing and capacity-building agreement with EvK2CNR to train local researchers to run monitoring stations themselves and negotiate finance independently.
Karakoram International University and the University of Baltistan are natural anchors, but lack funding, equipment and political continuity. The real lesson is not that Pakistan lacks natural wealth, but that it has not built the case for it. Natural capital accounting is the language climate finance now requires. Unfortunately, Pakistan is not yet fluent in it.
The writer is a freelance contributor.
