On the evening of July 6, 2025, a glacier lake outburst flood (GLOF) surged through the village of Hassanabad in Pakistan’s Hunza Valley, destroying houses and irrigation systems. Triggered by the rapid melting of the Shisper Glacier, the flash flood forced villagers to evacuate and also damaged the local water supply system. In response to the disaster and others in the region, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) initiated a recovery plan in October designed to support affected communities and restore critical infrastructure. This plan is being implemented and provides humanitarian assistance in the region.
Hassanabad is in the Gilgit-Baltistan region at the heart of Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountains. The nearby Shisper Glacier feeds a mountain stream in Hassanabad that carries rain and glacial meltwater. But the glacier has retreated dramatically in recent years. Its meltwater has formed and breached glacial lakes; the July ’25 flood was not the first. It was preceded by a catastrophic event in 2022 that destroyed 11 homes and a bridge on the Karakoram Highway. Gilgit-Baltistan faces some of the most significant GLOF hazards in Pakistan, with over 800,000 people living within 15 kilometers of a glacier, and hazard assessments ranking the region at the top of risk scales within the country.
A GLOF occurs when a glacier lake, formed by melting ice, suddenly bursts through an unstable dam, releasing a torrent of water. GLOFs are difficult to predict even with extensive monitoring. Hunza Valley has more limited monitoring resources than other parts of the world, and increasingly must contend with such disasters related to climate change.
OCHA’s Pakistan Support Plan for Relief and Early Recovery outlines a six-month (from October ’25 to April ’26) government-led humanitarian and early recovery response to the ’25 glacier and monsoon floods, including the one in Hassanabad. Together, these floods affected 6.9 million people and caused over 1,000 deaths across the regions of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan and Sindh. This plan targets 1.4 million people out of 2.8 million in need across 14 prioritized districts, combining immediate lifesaving assistance with early recovery interventions to restore basic services.
Relief operations that started in January ’26 in Hassanabad have progressed through successive phases of emergency assistance. According to the Karakoram Area Development Organization (KADO), Phase 3 of the Emergency Food Relief program successfully reached the targeted households in Hassanabad, Hunza. KADO also reported that the distribution process was conducted efficiently, emphasizing transparency and strong community coordination to ensure that aid reached the most vulnerable households.
Andrew J. Kruczkiewicz, a senior staff associate at Columbia Climate School’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP), explained that floods “are not just about rainfall or melting glaciers—they are about governance, communication and infrastructure.” He added that accurate, localized forecasting and community access to warning information are crucial for preventing loss of life. “Even if there are warning systems, do people have access to them? Do they trust them?” he asked. This suggests that warning systems alone are not enough to prevent disaster impacts. Instead, their effectiveness depends on whether they are embedded in functioning institutions. The fallout of natural disasters like GLOFs in Pakistan highlights the limits of the structural and institutional landscape in which they take place.
Kruczkiewicz also emphasized the importance of accurately forecasting flooding using information on past events. In Switzerland, for example, dense monitoring networks and robust civil protection systems enable authorities to issue timely alerts related to hazards such as avalanches. In Alaska, the government maps hazard zones and provides emergency assistance to residents affected by glacial floods. In these contexts, warning systems are effective because they are supported by strong monitoring institutions and well-resourced government agencies.
While Hassanabad provides an example of how the response unfolds locally, the plan operates at a national scale. Relief efforts have included providing food distribution, healthcare services and water and sanitation support. Large-scale relief distributions included over 100,000 food parcels, 55,000 tents and thousands of essential household items, helping families stabilize living conditions. The Pakistan National Society provided health support to 4,665 individuals and 13,503 individuals received cash assistance.
The flooding in Hassanabad reflects a broader challenge in Pakistan’s disaster governance. Antonia Fernanda Samur Zúñiga, a senior staff associate at NCDP, says interventions lack sustainability if they are not embedded in ongoing programs, policies and community governance structures. She explained: “Effective disaster preparedness involves regular training, integration into education and health systems and, most importantly, trusted partnerships with organizations already embedded in local communities.”
The ’25 Support Plan and current implementation reflect an understanding of preparedness similar to what Samur Zúñiga described. It is a step toward preparedness being embedded in routine governance, training and trusted community partnerships with real decision-making power. For example, it formalizes recurring national-to-district coordination to standardize interventions and identify needs as an attempt to make disaster response more systematic and repeatable. It elevates community engagement by strengthening an Accountability to Affected People and Community Engagement working group. Further, the Gilgit-Baltistan Disaster Management Authority convened a coordination meeting with partner organizations, including FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance, and conducted rapid assessments and restored affected areas.
The plan also integrates health and education systems and regular training. It operationalizes in part through health sector early recovery actions that include training and supporting community health workers and sustaining risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) to rebuild trust. During the coordination meetings conducted earlier this year, critical gaps in humanitarian assistance were highlighted and included the provision of water sanitation, heating and other hygiene facilities. These steps move in the direction of permanent institutionalization of disaster preparedness, although the plan is bound to its six-month mandate. This short timeframe is one of the initiative’s main limitations: a more robust plan would fully embed preparedness into permanent provincial and district institutions and ensure longer-term training and financing.
The GLOF in Hassanabad illustrates a pattern in Pakistan, where climate change is intensifying multiple forms of flooding, including monsoons and GLOFs. While glacier retreat can trigger GLOFs, understaffed institutions, outdated infrastructure and fragile recovery systems determine if a shock becomes a long-term disaster. The 2025 Support Plan matters not only because it mobilizes relief with quantifiable impacts on the population, but because it signals a push toward more structured coordination, clearer accountability and early recovery measures.
The path to preparedness is incremental. It depends on strengthening local capacity where possible and expanding trusted community partnerships so successive emergency responses do not each start from zero.
