THE RESIDENTS OF LASPUR VALLEY TO CONTAIN GLACIAL LAKE OUTBURST FLOOD BY BLOCK PLANTATION
“With each tree planted here, I find myself and my village safer, more secure from the devastations of GLOFs that loom large over our lives, says Mirza Wali of Balim in Laspur valley of Upper Chitral pointing to a sapling in his hand.
Wali’s effort is part of community-based mass plantation drive in the vast meadow land that lies upstream of the village. It started three years ago, over time achieving marvelous results with 86 thousand plants planted here thus far.
The village Bilam lies close to the glacier of Tharwagh (name the mountain range ). Successive episodes of GLOF over the last decade, including the one that destroyed the Golan valley and its power station in 2020 has alerted the residents of Bilam to the climate change and its terrifying power to wreck lives and livelihoods in the mountainous northtern district of Chitral.
The people of Balim in Laspur valley of Upper Chitral converted a large tract of arid land into a sprawling forest where community members, organized into a body, worked relentlessly to make the plantation drive a success. The drive and urge behind this intervention was to save the village from the devastations of the outburst of the glacier which they had witnessed in the valley of Golen which shares the same watershed with Balim. During the last 10 to 12 years, a number of villages including Reshun, Arkari, Sonoghur, Gohkir, Brep and MadakLasht have been devastated by the outburst of glacier triggered by climate change.
Mir Wali says that the Tharwagh glacier of Balim village joins the Golen glaciers rearward as both are 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 measure and the experts told us that mass plantation around it would be the best solution”, he said adding that all the 425 households were on the same page about the issue.
He said that the villagers approached the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme to seek its support in the plantation work which rushed to their help by approving its scheme under its Central Asian Poverty programme (CAPP). The common pasture of the villagenamed as Tharwagh in the name of the nearby glacier spreading over an enormous area of 47 acres. 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 know-how was also an issue.
Mr. Wail added that after their request was acceded to, they chose willow, a local species of plant for the block plantation and entered into an agreement with the organization as per which for each plant they were to be paid Rs.45 and for the plant surviving the season, they had to get Rs. 80. He said that the lucrative package prompted the community to plant as much as 80 thousand plants of willow in one season who made desperate efforts to save each and every plant by working day in, day out. They 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 for achieving the ambitious target of hundred percent survival rate of the plants”, he said adding that women were also participated actively in the process.
Hamid Ahmed Mir, a conservationist who worked with United Nations Development Program in its GLOF project, said that the approach of the villagers was quite commendable and the communities elsewhere facing the same risk may replicate it. He said that the initiative can be likened to ‘nipping devil in the bud’ or ‘a stich in time saves nine’ and it will surely pay off and save the village from the impending danger. He said that 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.
“This extensive and targeted plantation not only helped in causing cooling effect on the surrounding atmosphere by carbon sequestration process but would also lead to slope stabilization by reducing the soil erosion and land creeping. This is an excellent example of Ecosystem Based Adaptation approach towards climate action”, he said.
