In continuation of my earlier proposal to reshape global diplomatic architecture around transboundary geographical features, an instructive example is the Himalayan ecosystem shared by China (Tibet), Nepal, Bhutan, India, and Pakistan. The Himalayan snowpack—a 2,500- kilometer-long southern boundary of the Tibetan Plateau—provides freshwater to nearly 2 billion people, from the mountains of Tibet down to the deltas of Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Vietnam. The most densely populated and agrarian economies of Asia directly depend on these waters, supporting millions of farmers and livestock producers living downstream in the watersheds of the Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, and Mekong basins.
The Himalayas are the key thermal balancer for the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Their towering peaks block the freezing northern winds, making the subcontinental plain temperate enough to serve as an agrarian heartland, while also subduing warm oceanic winds from the south to regulate the Asian Summer Monsoon system. Beyond their hydrothermal significance, the Himalayas are integral to the subcontinent’s cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual evolution. Two great civilizations of antiquity flourished along the banks of Himalayan rivers—the Indus Valley and Ganga-Jamuna civilizations.
Despite this inextricable importance, the Himalayan ecosystem is among the most critical victims of man’s contempt for nature. The Himalayan glacial sheet is facing the direct brunt of the carbon footprint produced by the three most populous nations on Earth and is melting at an alarming pace. Average snowfall has decreased drastically. “Nepal today is on thin ice—losing close to one-third of its ice in just over thirty years,” warned António Guterres while addressing the Everest Dialogue in 2025. During my own diagnostic study in the Pakistani Himalayas this year, three nomadic heads confirmed that more than 50 percent of glaciers have disappeared over the past few decades, causing flash floods that uproot debris and rocks, sweeping away entire villages, vehicles, and roads.
The Himalayas have over 9,500 glacial lakes, many prone to catastrophic flooding due to rising temperatures. Periodic cloudbursts, flash floods, and landslides are making life increasingly precarious in remote regions of the Himalayan arc—including Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Gilgit-Baltistan, Ladakh, Kashmir, and Kaghan—and further westward into the highlands of the Hindukush and Karakoram ranges. Subject to institutional negligence and difficult access, civilian infrastructure for safety, health, and communication remains particularly poor in the northern regions of India and Pakistan compared to the Alps or Pyrenees in Europe. Large-scale deforestation for domestic fuel and industrial timber extraction has long been a lucrative business in these regions. Worsening water scarcity driven by uncontrolled population growth and rampant food insecurity in the riparian states is fueling both interstate and intrastate conflicts—India has threatened to weaponize Himalayan waters at the interstate level, while disputes over smaller rivers, reservoirs, and provincial allocations are sparking internal tensions within both India and Pakistan.
Given the existential importance of the region’s hydrology amid rising energy demand for dense populations, the Himalayan states have installed cascading mountain tunnels using dynamite to divert natural river flows and operate dozens of run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects. Many of these mushrooming installations lie in seismically active zones. Their massive interventions have caused subsidence, landslides, deforestation, the forced displacement of local villages, and the destruction of river ecosystems. Three nuclear powers with a history of armed conflict over the glaciers of this region—China, India, and Pakistan—have deployed infantry and mechanized brigades to guard these hydroelectric structures and other strategic installations, thus creating continuous strategic turbulence at the foothills of the Himalayas.
An important yet overlooked aspect of this negligence is that these mountain ranges host hundreds of beautiful valleys—“Shangri-Las,” in James Hilton’s words—where pastoral tribes with distinct cultural heritage have lived in harmony with nature for centuries. The collective memories of these tribes reflect the phenological and topographic rhythms of Himalayan history. Their pastoral economy and rare traditions are now seriously endangered due to unexpectedly rapid changes in climate and hydrology. These communities are struggling with low productivity, water scarcity, and declining soil nutrients. The disappearing glaciers not only constitute the main vertical of their ecological economy—based on seasonal farming, dairy, and livestock—but these snow deposits also shape a central experience in their spiritual and aesthetic universe.
Abdul Ahad Azad, a Kashmiri poet, romanticizes glaciers in verse:
It is you who inject life into amorphous streams, lakes, and rivers.
Oh ambrosian glacier, it is you who glorifies our existence.
Oh beauteous glacier, when you roll down from the peak like a curvaceous deer,
Pause in your journey and listen to my melodies for you.
You sacrifice yourself to distribute love among foes and friends.
Oh my charming glacier, God has acknowledged your silent sacrifice!
Under the proposed system, a joint institutional framework under the Treaty of the Himalayas would unite the Himalayan states to collaboratively preserve the region’s ecosystem. Protecting Himalayan glaciers could become a peace-building measure more valuable than nuclear deterrence. This special-purpose framework would map, identify, and act on potential avenues for multilevel cooperation, integrated regulation, and transboundary conservation—to reverse or adapt to the anthropogenic degradation of their shared glacial sheets and forests—turning a historical source of conflict into an opportunity for cross-border ecological peace in South Asia.
Additionally, the framework would monitor and assess the ecological outcomes of the region’s hydroelectric structures, re-evaluate their long-term cost-benefit analyses, and design mitigation strategies to minimize their environmental, hydrological, and economic impacts on local communities. Beyond infrastructure oversight, the framework could coordinate climate-adaptation programs, implement community-based watershed management, and integrate indigenous and local knowledge for ecosystem preservation. It could also launch advocacy campaigns in local languages, promote citizen-science initiatives, and facilitate cross-border knowledge exchange to strengthen resilience, enhance environmental stewardship, and deepen participatory governance across the Himalayan region.
The Indus Waters Treaty, signed between India and Pakistan in 1960, primarily focuses on the management and distribution of rivers, tributaries, and drains, but not on the preservation of the source itself—the Himalayas. Interestingly, the word glacier does not appear even once in the entire document, despite glaciers being the basic source of the eastern and western rivers it governs. The treaty now requires expansion into a larger, more comprehensive framework under a proposed Treaty of the Himalayas to maintain legal and hydrological relevance amid the fastchanging realities of climate change, rising urbanization, melting glaciers, and increasingly frequent floods in both countries.
The Himalayan collapse is a classic case study of civilization’s self-destructive tendencies. This state of affair demands an urgent conceptual and operational shift in South Asian diplomatic priorities, with serious, specific, and accurate assessments of their ecological deterioration, data collection, and mitigation strategies. In 2025 alone, monsoon floods triggered by massive hydrothermal imbalance in the Himalayan ecosystem submerged hundreds of villages downstream in India and Pakistan; millions have been displaced, and thousands of hectares of cultivated land washed away. The three major powers sharing the Himalayan ecosystem—China, India, and Pakistan—bear the primary responsibility to take the initiative and persuade the remaining states to reimagine the survival of future generations and humanity’s relationship with nature—not as a by-product of economy or power, but as the main pillar of their diplomacy. A proposed Union of the Himalayas, backed by a clear operational blueprint, could become a responsive and targeted instrument for climate security and stability in South Asia.
(The author is a regular columnist and commentator on global affairs, serving on the panels of the UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy at the National Defense University of Pakistan.)
