- Melting glaciers and expanding glacial lakes are altering Himachal Pradesh’s hazard profile, increasing the risk of glacial lake outburst floods for downstream communities.
- In Kullu Valley, riverside development, muck dumping and weak flood-risk zoning are increasing exposure and vulnerability, turning natural hazards into disasters.
- As climate risks increase, the state needs stronger spatial planning, community-led preparedness, participatory risk mapping, early warning systems, and no-build zones along rivers.
- The views in the commentary are that of the author.
Melting glaciers are one of the clearest signs of climate change. But for the people living downstream of them, close enough to touch this melted ice within hours, they are a sign of an impending disaster. The Himalayas have lost an average of 27 metres of ice since 1975, while glacial loss has doubled since 2000, according to recent findings. There is a growing climate crisis in the world’s largest freshwater repository outside the poles, and for mountain states like Himachal Pradesh, this also means the emergence of new disaster risks.
Towering high over the rugged landscape, these glaciers form the headwaters of rivers that sustain several towns and villages across the state. Global warming is the main reason glaciers are melting faster. The Himalayas are also warming faster than the global average. However, infrastructure development activities can have local effects too, especially through carbon and dust emissions. This is leading to the formation of new glacial lakes, and the expansion of existing ones.
A glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) occurs when such a lake releases a large volume of water suddenly, often triggered by landslides, avalanches, or even intense rainfall. The 2013 Kedarnath disaster that wiped out nearly 6,000 lives in Uttarakhand was a GLOF event triggered by heavy rain. With many roads, towns and tourism sites located in narrow river valleys across the western Himalayas, these fast-moving flows of water and debris can have devastating impacts.
A 2025 study notes that GLOFs in the Himalayas have become more frequent and destructive after 2000, while another reports that the number of glacial lakes in Himachal has more than doubled between 2016 and 2022. Since the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters is already on the rise in the western Himalayan states, the GLOF threat is amplifying the overall disaster vulnerability of many communities downstream that remain largely unprepared.
Is a disaster truly natural?
Since 2023, monsoon-related disasters in Himachal have claimed around 1,197 lives and cost over ₹16,000 crores in damages. Flash floods in Beas and Sutlej rivers raked highways, hydropower projects, homes and fields alike, with impacts felt as far downstream as Punjab. But even as these “natural” disasters are attributed to erratic rainfall patterns due to climate change, the critical difference between hazard and disaster often gets overlooked. Now more than ever, the melting glaciers are compelling us to reckon with that difference.
According to a 2016 study, Lahaul and Spiti have the highest risks of GLOFs, but the overall disaster risk is the highest in the districts of Chamba, Kinnaur, and Kullu because they have more settlements and more vulnerable communities. Simply put, disaster risk depends on three factors: the hazard risk in the area, the number of people exposed to that hazard, and the social vulnerability of those people.
The disasters unfolding across the western Himalayas — from Dharali in Uttarakhand to Kullu in Himachal to Chositi in Jammu and Kashmir — make one thing quite clear. When we build important infrastructure in hazard-prone areas, we bring people into the path of danger and put their lives and livelihoods at risk. If where and how we build are the decisions that convert hazards into disasters, do we still get to call them “natural”?
In Kullu Valley, houses, hotels, markets and public infrastructure have spread along the four-lane national highway, following the Beas river closely. While this increases exposure to hazard, the absence of more early warning systems, heightens community vulnerabilities. On top of that, muck dumping, deforestation, land-use change and slope-cutting amplify hazard risk as well. In other words, the way spatial development happens in these valleys can increase hazard, exposure, and vulnerability all at once.
Projections estimate that potential glacial lakes in the Beas basin may contain the highest volume of water in the state. From 2016 to 2022 alone, the number of lakes here has increased from 63 to 139, raising serious concerns over the adaptation strategies required to address the increasing GLOF risk. Further, Kullu Valley could see a seven-fold increase in probability of GLOF due to increasing glacial melting in the Beas basin.
The need for spatial governance
Although Kullu’s current development plan acknowledges both development and environmental concerns, it does not translate them into clear spatial rules. For example, it mentions that development is restricted beyond the high-flood level of Beas river, but this level is neither clearly described nor spatially demarcated, perhaps because a comprehensive flood zonation study for the region is still pending. In a valley already under pressure from tourism, road expansion and river-side development, such ambiguity can itself become a planning risk.
Despite these gaps in information and planning, urban expansion continues in response to tourism and development pressures. Recent floods in the river have already exceeded habitation and road levels, and what new levels a GLOF event could impact remains uncertain. Just like in Shimla’s development plan, hazard layers are distinctly absent in Kullu’s spatial analysis, which also fails to engage with local-scale conditions. This keeps planning top-down and over-generalised, while leaving it detached from the realities people face on the ground.
Spatial governance is indispensable in the Himalayan landscapes not only because of their multiplicity of natural hazards, but also because development itself is generating new risks. In 2025, the Supreme Court flagged Himachal’s growing climate crisis citing unregulated development and ecological neglect, and instructed its government to develop an action plan. The debt-stressed state is facing an urgent need to build resilience to climate change while strained by challenges of limited capacities.
Involving communities in planning
With rising uncertainties, decisions on where development occurs and how, are increasingly determining disaster risk. In Himachal, spatial planning frameworks only partially account for this risk. This limits the ability of planning systems to respond to the multi-hazard landscape, indicating the need for stronger integration of local-scale environmental and social dynamics into planning processes.
For environmental knowledge to become the premise of adaptive planning, integration of hazard and ecological information from both technological monitoring and community experience is necessary. Stories of frontline communities resisting disasters with cooperation and prompt action tell us that resilience is enabled through community agency and knowledge.
In the 2024 Malana flash flood, Chhape Ram Negi alerted the downstream communities of dam failure, and as part of a self-organised team, led the rescue of stranded dam workers, demonstrating the strength and capacities of frontline communities under threat.
While the state continues to invest in technological infrastructure, climate action frameworks in these mountains reveal a gap in the integration of community-led spatial adaptation. Both research and experience from the region suggest that collaborative approaches that connect local governments with communities, universities and NGOs can enhance local adaptive capacity and contextual responsiveness.
Resilience will depend on stronger local networks, shared knowledge, and collaborative spatial planning that can turn policy into action. For instance, locally maintained alert systems and clearly mapped no-build zones along rivers can help communities reduce avoidable delays and exposure. Specifically, community-led preparedness and rescue networks, participatory risk mapping, the use of hazard maps in zoning and planning, and stopping construction and muck dumping in river zones can make local responses more effective.
Resilience must be built from the ground up, in the landscapes people know best.
Banner image: The 2023 Beas floods washed away a segment of the Manali-Leh Highway, with the snow-capped peaks near the Beas Kund glacier visible in the background in Manali. Image by Sumit Mahar/Himdhara Collective.
The author is an urban designer and visual artist based in Shimla. Their work focuses on Himalayan urbanism, spatial governance, disaster risk, and climate adaptation.
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