CHITRAL: “With each tree planted here, I find myself and my village safer and more secure from the devastations of Glofs that loom large over our lives,” says Mirza Wali of the Balim village in Laspur valley of Upper Chitral district, pointing to a sapling in his hand.

Wali’s effort is part of a community-based mass plantation drive in the vast meadowland upstream of the village, which lies near the Tharwagh glacier.

It began three years ago and has since achieved remarkable results, with 86,000 saplings planted.

Successive Glof events over the last decade, including the one that destroyed the Golan valley and its power station in 2020, has alerted the people of Bilam to the potential of climate change to wreck lives and livelihoods in the mountainous northern region.

Expert urges other communities to adopt approach

The Balim villagers have converted a large tract of arid land into a sprawling forest where community members, organised into a body, worked relentlessly to make the plantation drive a success.

The drive was meant to save the village from the devastations of Glofs that they had witnessed in the valley of Golen, which shares the same watershed with Balim.

During the last 10-12 years, a number of villages, including Reshun, Arkari, Sonoghur, Gohkir, Brep and Madak Lasht, have been devastated by the outburst of glaciers triggered by climate change.

Mr Wali said the Tharwagh glacier joined the Golen glaciers rearward as both were situated in the same system of mountains, giving a shared watershed to the valleys of Laspur and Golen of Chitral and Bashqar of Swat.

“The proximity of the village to Golen valley and its glaciers, which have exploded a number of time recently, has made us to take strong preemptive measures, with the experts suggesting mass plantation around it as the best solution,” he said, adding that all 425 households were on the same page about the issue.

He said the villagers approached the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme for its support in the plantation work and the AKRSP rushed to their help by approving its scheme under its Central Asian Poverty Programme.

The villager said the common pasture of the village was named Tharwagh after the nearby glacier spreading over an enormous area of 47 acres.

He said the major hurdles were the unavailability of irrigation water and supply of saplings for plantation as the area was enormous and bearing its heavy expenses was beyond their capacity while lack of technical knowhow was also an issue.

Mr Wali said after the request was accepted, the villagers chose willow, a local species of plant, for “block plantation” and made an agreement with the organisation under which they were to be paid Rs45 for each plant and Rs80 for the plant surviving the season.

He said that the lucrative package prompted the community to plant as much as 80,000 willow saplings in one season that made desperate efforts to save each and every plant by working day in, day out.

The villager attributed the success of the project largely to the selection of the species whose saplings were prepared by simply cutting the branches of a mature tree of willow and thus became highly cost effective as hundreds of saplings were obtained from a single tree while they were highly adapted to the local environment.

“The survival rate of the plants was nearly 95 percent at the end of the year of plantation as the community members did their level best to achieve the ambitious target of a 100 per cent survival rate of the plants,” he said, adding that women also actively participated in the exercise.

Hamid Ahmed Mir, a conservationist, who worked for the United Nations Development Programme’s Glof project, said the approach of the villagers was quite commendable and the communities facing the same risk elsewhere could replicate it.

He said that the initiative could be likened to “nipping devil in the bud” or “a stitch in time saves nine” and would surely pay off and save the village from the impending Glof danger.

“Plantation is one of the best mitigation measures to slow down climate change and capture the carbon which ran amuck leading to the outburst of glaciers,” he said.

The expert said the extensive and targeted plantation not only helped cause cooling effect in the surrounding atmosphere by carbon sequestration process but it would also lead to slope stabilisation by reducing the soil erosion and land creeping.

“This is an excellent example of the Ecosystem Based Adaptation approach towards climate action,” he said.

Published in Dawn, April 3rd, 2025