The government has called for integration of national institutions dealing with climate, glacier monitoring, early warning systems, satellite data, and disaster management to ensure timely availability and effective use of climate related data, with officials stressing the need for a coordinated mechanism through which relevant departments could automatically share data rather than waiting for formal requests from one another. Federal Minister for Climate Change and Environmental Coordination Dr Musadik Malik made these remarks while addressing a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change and Environmental Coordination, chaired by Senator Sherry Rehman. Dr Malik said the Prime Minister had constituted a committee under the Ministry of Defence to bring relevant departments and institutions onto a common platform, adding that a virtual platform had already been developed as part of efforts to integrate the available information.
The minister outlined how climate related monitoring responsibilities are currently scattered across multiple institutions, with glacier and water systems handled by the Ministry of Water Resources, while WAPDA is responsible for devices monitoring snowfall and glacier melt. Early warning systems fall under the Ministry of Defence, satellite data is handled by the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), and disaster related matters are dealt with by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), with Dr Malik stressing that these systems needed to be brought together so the country could receive integrated and timely data rather than relying on institutions individually requesting information from each other. He said the government was also working towards establishing a new authority to deal with civilian weather related matters, which would also serve as the ministry’s think tank, with proposals in this regard to be finalised and presented before the federal cabinet shortly.
Discussing glacier related risks specifically, Dr Malik said the government was exploring the use of digital twinning for better understanding and modelling of climate and glacier related risks, and stressed the need for establishing a digital laboratory. This push toward digital twin technology, which creates dynamic virtual representations of physical systems that can be interrogated and updated in response to real world observations, would give Pakistan a more sophisticated modeling capability than the largely manual and satellite dependent monitoring approaches used so far. Officials informed the committee that there were 115 potentially dangerous glacial lakes, of which 105 had unfrozen as of August 5, while the rate of glacier area loss in the Karakoram Highway region had increased from 3.2 percent in the 1990s to 4.9 percent during 2010-2020, with Karakoram glaciers having declined by around 12 percent between 1990 and 2020.
Dr Malik said data from areas where conventional monitoring was difficult was increasingly being obtained through satellite systems, while towers had also been installed at locations where data was previously unavailable, extending Pakistan’s physical monitoring infrastructure into terrain that has historically been too remote or costly to survey regularly. He noted that reliable data on the rate of glacier melt in Pakistan remained limited because glacier monitoring is an expensive exercise, a constraint that a more integrated digital platform combining satellite data, ground sensors, and modeling tools could help address by making existing data collection efforts more efficient rather than requiring entirely new physical infrastructure. Whether the proposed digital twin platform and digital laboratory move from concept to functioning tools will likely depend on how quickly the Prime Minister’s Defence Ministry-led committee finalizes the technical framework needed to bring SUPARCO, WAPDA, NDMA, and other relevant institutions onto the shared virtual platform Dr Malik referenced during the Senate committee session.
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