ISLAMABAD: Unusually high temperatures in Pakistan’s northern areas have resulted in rapid melting of glaciers, officials and experts said on Friday, warning that the prolonged phenomenon could lead to water shortages and threaten lives in the longer run.
The South Asian country of 241 million is home to more than 7,253 known glaciers, and contains more glacial ice than any other country on earth outside the polar regions. Almost all these glaciers lie in the northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The glaciers are an essential source and provide around 70 percent of fresh water for Pakistan that flows into the rivers, supplying drinking water to humans, ecological habitats and for agricultural activity, and even powers electricity, according to the Green Network. But recent heatwaves and above normal temperatures are causing the snow to melt faster.
“The glaciers are our water bank and a lifeline for the whole country, but the high temperatures and climate change are resulting in their fast melting,” Dr. Zaheer Ahmed Babar, a director at the Pakistan Meteorological Department, told Arab News.
“The ratio of snow melting and subsequent water flow in the rivers are comparatively high as temperatures in the northern regions have recorded an increase of four to five degrees Celsius this month. In the longer run, if the phenomenon of high temperatures persists in the northern regions, our snow accumulation on the glaciers may lead to depletion and cause water shortages across Pakistan.”
Pakistan is currently witnessing a heatwave, with temperatures this week soaring above 52 degrees Celsius in the country’s southern regions, according to the PMD.
Babar said extreme weather patterns in Pakistan were getting prolonged with the passage of time, resulting in floods, heatwaves and a rise in seawater level, adding that the mercury was expected to drop after June 15 with the advent of the pre-monsoon rains.
Following an increased waterflow in rivers this month, the Indus River System Authority (IRSA) has increased the share of water for all provinces, bridging shortages for drinking and agriculture purposes.
“There are no water shortages now as we have been providing water to all the provinces as per their actual demand,” Khalid Idrees Rana, an operations director at IRSA, told Arab News.
“Our rivers are swelling at the moment due to the increased waterflow from the melting glaciers. The unusual high temperatures in the area are resulting in increased waterflow.”
Rana said the authority was providing 140,000 cusecs each to Punjab and Sindh provinces, 11,000 cusecs to Balochistan and 3,000 cusecs to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
“The increased waterflows in rivers are good for agriculture in the short term, but this could be dangerous in the longer term as we need a sustainable supply of water from our glaciers the whole year,” he said.
Experts have linked the increase in melting of glaciers to adverse impacts of climate change and called on people to adapt to sustainable use of water, especially in the agriculture sector, to conserve the precious resource.
“The fast glacier-melting is obviously the climate change phenomenon, and Pakistan needs to mobilize a global effort to mitigate its impacts through reduction in carbon emissions,” Dr. Qamar Zaman, a lead author of Pakistan’s national climate change policy, told Arab News.
“We need to ensure sustainable use of water by discouraging flood irrigation as the swift glaciers melting could affect regular water availability in the country.”

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani police working closely with Interpol have raided a home in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir and arrested a Pakistani woman convicted in Italy of killing her daughter, officials said Friday.
Nazia Shaheen was arrested in a village in Pakistan-administered Kashmir on Thursday and was presented before a judge in Islamabad on Friday, officials at the Federal Investigation Agency and the police said.
Islamabad police confirmed the arrest, and other Pakistani officials said that Interpol helped police in tracing the woman.
Officials say Pakistan’s government will soon start the process to extradite her to Italy, where a court last year convicted Shaheen, her husband and an uncle of murdering Saman Abbas, an 18-year-Pakistani woman.
The woman was killed after she refused her family’s demands to marry a cousin in their homeland.
Arranged marriages are the norm among many conservative Pakistanis, and hundreds of women are killed every year in so-called honor killings carried out by husbands or relatives as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behavior.
Abbas’ body was dug up in November 2022 in an abandoned farmhouse near the fields where her father worked in northern Italy — a year and a half after she was last seen alive on surveillance video walking near the same fields with her parents. Italian police had said she was was killed by her family on May 1, 2021.
Her parents flew from Milan to Pakistan after the murder.
Since then, Pakistani police had been trying to trace Shaheen, whose husband Shabbar Abbas was arrested in Pakistan in 2022. He was later extradited to Italy, where a court convicted and sentenced him to life in prison in 2023.
Shaheen was tried in absentia and sentenced to life in prison.
Abbas’ uncle, Danish Hasnain, was handed a 14-year prison term by a court in Reggio Emilia.
Italy has already concluded that Abbas’ two cousins weren’t guilty of killing her and the were released from jail. The slain woman’s father, who was extradited from Pakistan in August, professed his innocence during a tearful statement to the court before deliberations.
The trial was the most high-profile of several criminal investigations in Italy in recent years dealing with the slaying or mistreatment of immigrant women or girls who rebelled against family insistence that they marry someone chosen for them.
After the murder of Abbas, an autopsy revealed that the young woman had a broken neck bone, possibly caused by strangulation. She had emigrated as a teenager from Pakistan to a farm town, Novellara, in Italy’s northern region of Emilia-Romagna.
Authorities in Italy have said she quickly embraced Western ways, including shedding her headscarf and dating a young man of her choice. In one social media post, she and her Pakistani boyfriend were shown kissing on a street in the regional capital, Bologna.
According to Italian investigators, that kiss enraged Abbas’ parents, who wanted her to marry a cousin in Pakistan. Abbas had reportedly told her boyfriend that she feared for her life, because of her refusal to marry an older man in her homeland.