By: Anuj Kumar Verma
Forests and mountains are nature’s most powerful shields against a warming planet. Trees anchor soil, moderate temperature, absorb carbon, and slow rainfall so that water seeps into the ground rather than rushing downslope as destructive floods. In Jammu and Kashmir, that protective cover is being steadily and irreversibly torn away by large-scale deforestation driven by major infrastructure projects, even as a rapidly warming atmosphere turns the consequences lethal. Every monsoon, the region’s valleys echo with the same grim news of cloudbursts, landslides and flash floods claiming lives that careful, accountable planning could have spared.
The scale of human loss in recent years tells a devastating story. In August 2025, two cloudbursts struck Chishoti village in Kishtwar during the Machail Mata pilgrimage, killing between 65 and 68 people, followed days later by a landslide near the Vaishno Devi shrine that claimed 32 pilgrims. In July 2026, flash floods in Poonch and Rajouri killed at least 23 people, including children swept from their beds, destroying hundreds of homes and submerging around 100 vehicles. These are not isolated accidents but predictable outcomes of choices made over many years.
The impact of global warming has significantly deepened this risk. The Western Himalayas are warming at nearly twice the average rate of the rest of India, and warmer air holds roughly seven percent more moisture for every degree Celsius gained, meaning monsoon rains now arrive in heavier and more destructive bursts. The Kolahoi Glacier has lost nearly a quarter of its area since 1962. A University of Kashmir study has identified five glacial lakes in the Kashmir Himalaya very likely to burst and cause floods, among them Gangabal and Nundkol in Ganderbal district, where a flood from Nundkol alone might damage 1,184 buildings, four bridges and a hydropower plant. Local villagers and shepherds have received no official warnings or evacuation advice, even as scientists urge regular monitoring, early warning systems and community readiness. Kishtwar district alone is home to 197 glacial lakes that are expanding at an alarming rate as glaciers retreat, capable of releasing massive torrents with virtually no warning.
Yet climate change alone cannot explain why the same valleys suffer the same fate year after year. The missing piece of this tragedy is the deliberate and largely unaccountable destruction of the very forests that once held these slopes together. Official records and RTI responses reveal the true and staggering scale of green cover lost to infrastructure. The Srinagar Ring Road, constructed between 2018 and 2021, resulted in the felling of over 1.10 lakh trees of chinar, apple, walnut, pear, mulberry and plum. The Jammu Ring Road added thousands more. Together, both ring roads stripped the region of over 1.18 lakh trees between 2018 and 2025. Kashmir’s iconic chinar, once numbering around 42,000 trees in the 1970s, has fallen to approximately 35,000 today, despite carrying formal legal protection as the region’s Royal Tree under the Jammu and Kashmir Preservation of Specified Trees Act, 1969. Between 2021 and 2023, J&K lost a major chunk of its green cover, a decline environmentalists directly link to the measurable rise in temperatures now recorded across both Jammu and Srinagar.
The ongoing Jammu–Katra Expressway, a key segment of the 670-kilometre Delhi–Amritsar–Katra corridor being executed by the National Highways Authority of India, deserves particular and urgent attention. An RTI response obtained by Jammu-based activist Raman Sharma confirms that 21,483 trees are being removed for this single project — 11,946 trees in the Jammu Forest Division along the Kunjwani–Sidhra section, 1,781 along the Sidhra–Ban Toll section, and 7,756 across the ecologically sensitive Domel–Katra stretch through the Reasi Forest Division. Of these, over 8,400 trees have already been felled, with 13,332 more sanctioned for removal in a phased programme. Beyond the tree count, the project has diverted over 716 kanals — approximately 36.25 hectares — of forest land for non-forestry construction purposes, permanently erasing terrain that once anchored fragile Himalayan slopes against rain and gravity.
The cumulative toll across all highway and expressway projects is alarming by any measure. The expansion of the Srinagar–Baramula Highway has felled hundreds of age-old native trees including dozens of chinars. The four-laning of the Jammu–Srinagar National Highway, the widening of the Srinagar–Qazigund Expressway — which alone removed 75 chinar trees in Pulwama and Anantnag — and the Jammu Ring Road have collectively added hundreds more ancient trees to the tally. Forest fires, accelerated by the drying effect of deforestation and climate stress, compounded the loss further: between November 2023 and June 2024 alone, J&K recorded 4,156 forest fire incidents, an average of 17 fires every single day.
The manner of construction has caused damage that goes far beyond any tree count. Heavy machinery and controlled explosives have blasted through loose rocky hillsides across Kishtwar, Doda, Reasi and the Pir Panjal range. Blasting does not simply clear rock, it fractures the internal structure of slopes, creating hidden fault lines that monsoon water later exploits with devastating and often fatal force. Excavated muck and debris, instead of being responsibly disposed of, has routinely been dumped onto riverbeds and banks, narrowing waterways until even moderate rainfall overflows into catastrophic floods. The Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana has also been driven through fragile mountain terrain at a pace that has far outrun environmental assessment, altering stream courses, discharge areas and closed aquifers due to absent geo-hydrological assessments, creating insufficient drainage arrangements and inadequate slope stabilisation, deficiencies that turn every monsoon into a death sentence for downstream communities.
Jammu and Kashmir’s expanding road network has undeniably created remarkable opportunities for tourism and economic growth, generating livelihoods across hospitality, transport and local services. However, this expansion is simultaneously driving an environmental crisis that threatens the very natural beauty that makes the region a tourism destination. With increased tourist movements, there is a big surge in the number of motor vehicles plying on roads of this Himalayan region. Lacs of motor vehicles plying daily on the roads emitting carbon dioxide which further adds up to the rising temperatures due to Global Warming and the local reasons. The solution lies not in choosing between growth and conservation, but in designing a system where economic development and environmental protection actively strengthen each other. That balance is neither impossible nor unprecedented — it is simply absent from the decisions being made today.
The government must now move decisively beyond rescue and relief. Satellite-based glacial lake sensors, developed in collaboration with ISRO scientists and linked directly to district control rooms, must be installed to enable at least thirty-minute evacuation alerts for vulnerable villages. An independent ecological audit must precede any further tree felling above 1,000 metres. All road projects, including those under PMGSY, must clear mandatory water-flow and soil-stability assessments before a single blade of machinery breaks ground. Tunnel-first and elevated-bridge designs — standard practice in Switzerland, Japan, the United States and China — must replace slope-cutting in geologically sensitive zones, with the latest international technologies for mountain road construction actively explored and adopted. Green public transportation on major tourist routes should be introduced, which’ll offer the most effective approach to sustainable tourism. Electric shuttle fleets, including E buses and E taxis/ cars, powered by renewable energy, supported by comfortable parking areas with rest stops, should only be allowed to reach popular destinations like Gulmarg, Pahalgam,
Sonamarg and Katra. Zermatt in Switzerland demonstrates that banning combustion vehicles while maintaining high tourist satisfaction is entirely achievable.
Large-scale tree planting using native species such as deodar cedar and Himalayan oak along major roads would reduce emissions and improve scenic beauty. Community-led waste management, biodegradable packaging, and mandatory water recycling at commercial sites would safeguard the region’s rivers. Establishing a dedicated Sustainable Tourism Authority uniting tourism, environment, transport, and forest departments is essential for lasting change. Jammu and Kashmir’s mountains and glaciers are irreplaceable, and protecting them is the only reliable foundation for long-term economic success.
An emergency plantation drive of five lakh native trees — deodar cedar, Himalayan oak and other indigenous species — funded through a dedicated Mountain Disaster Prevention Fund kept entirely separate from post-disaster relief budgets, must begin without delay, with survival and maintenance guaranteed by government agencies and local panchayats for a minimum of five years. The ban on illegal sand and stone mining must be strictly and uniformly enforced. All wetlands, including the critically diminished Wular Lake, must be restored to their original dimensions. All types of constructions on riverbanks and flood plain corridors, in all districts of J&K, must be identified and removed with genuine political and administrative willpower, with displaced residents shifted to safer locations with subsidised land allotments and livelihood support. All forest lands must be cleared of illegally constructed concrete structures, without exception and regardless of the identity of the encroacher. River channels must be systematically dredged and desilted not as a one-time measure but as sustained annual policy. A dedicated Sustainable Tourism Authority, uniting tourism, environment, transport and forest departments under a single mandate, is essential for lasting and coherent change.
Jammu and Kashmir’s mountains have not failed their people. Cleared forests, blasted hillsides, choked rivers, encroached floodplains and a warming sky have failed them. The choice before the administration is stark: continue down a path of short-term development that extracts an annual toll in lives and homes, or pivot decisively toward sustainable construction that heals rather than wounds the mountains. The people of Jammu and Kashmir deserve mountains that protect them, not mountains made complicit in their destruction. The time for excuses has long passed. The time for ecological restoration and accountable development begins today.
The author is a social activist and convenor of We The Humans Forum for Nature and Mankind
