Kashmir is running out of time to protect the glaciers, forests and rivers that keep its economy alive, and the region’s response to that fact says something about how seriously it takes the crisis. 

This week, a university in Awantipora opened a four-day international conference built around a proposition that sounds almost too simple: the best defense against a changing climate is the natural world itself, restored rather than replaced.

The idea merits more attention than it usually gets. 

Governments tend to reach for concrete when floods threaten, for embankments when rivers swell, and for pumps when glaciers melt too fast. 

Engineering has its place, but the Himalayas are proving, year after year, that concrete cannot substitute for a functioning watershed, and steel cannot replace a forest that once absorbed floodwater before it reached a village.

The region’s top administrator opened the conference with a blunt assessment: climate change is moving at an alarming pace, and the Himalayas are absorbing the consequences faster than most places on earth. 

That claim is not........

© Kashmir Observer