Climate change in Jammu and Kashmir has stopped being a subject for seminar rooms and started becoming a lived, dated, witnessed event. This July, over the span of five days, the sacred ice formation at the Amarnath cave, revered by pilgrims as a manifestation of Lord Shiva and the physical centre of one of Hinduism’s oldest surviving pilgrimages, receded from roughly seven feet to about one. This is not a single unusual season. It is the third consecutive year the ice has failed to hold its form even a week into the Yatra. What is unfolding in these mountains is not only a story about water and temperature. It is a story about how a warming climate reaches into a region’s economy, its livelihoods, and the continuity of practices that have shaped a place’s identity for centuries and touches all three at once.
The Amarnath Yatra’s documented history stretches back further than most assume. Kalhana’s twelfth-century chronicle, the Rajatarangini, records Queen Suryamati of Kashmir building temples at Amareshwara in the eleventh century, and a European traveller, G.T. Vigne, described Hindu pilgrims at the cave as early as 1842, predating the more commonly told account of a shepherd’s rediscovery of the shrine in the mid-nineteenth century.
Through the Dogra era, the Yatra grew steadily under state patronage, its route, camp infrastructure and annual scale expanding across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as it evolved from a remote, arduous pilgrimage into one of the subcontinent’s largest annual religious gatherings, eventually formalised under a statutory shrine board in 2001. Vaishno Devi’s recorded history runs comparably deep: an 1847 royal chronicle places Raja Jas Dev of Jammu at the shrine in 996 CE, and the widely told account of Pandit Shridhar’s discovery of the cave is generally dated to seven to ten centuries ago, with its own shrine board established in 1986. Both pilgrimages carry devotional weight measured in centuries, and both have, in the modern era, grown into some of the largest annual mass gatherings in the subcontinent, drawing millions of devotees each year to remote, high-altitude terrain that was never built, geologically, to hold that scale of human presence.
The numbers illustrate the strain. Amarnath’s ice formation, according to climate researchers and observers who have followed the pilgrimage for decades, has failed to hold its shape past mid-July in each of the last several years, a pattern linked to four consecutive winters of below-normal snowfall, rising regional heatwaves, and a specific, almost mechanical factor: on peak days, 13,000 to 20,000 pilgrims pass through an enclosed cave, and their collective presence measurably raises the temperature around the very ice they have come to venerate. Concern has grown, among conservationists and local communities alike, about how additional infrastructure meant to ease pilgrim access might further intensify pressure on an ecosystem already struggling to sustain current numbers. Meanwhile devotion continues to draw more people each year: 2026’s Yatra recorded 28 per cent more pilgrims in its first six days than the previous year.
Vaishno Devi’s strain takes a different form but points in the same direction. This week, a rain-triggered landslide shut the shrine’s battery-car route in Katra. It was not an isolated event. Last August, a landslide on the Adhkwari route injured pilgrims and suspended both battery-car and helicopter services entirely, arriving amid one of Jammu’s heaviest monsoon downpours in years, 250 millimetres of rain in 20 hours, a dangerously swollen Tawi river, and stretches of the Jammu-Srinagar highway closed by landslides of their own. These are not isolated coincidences striking the same mountain twice. They form a pattern, recurring on the same monsoon calendar, on the same range, with growing frequency.
It helps here to separate what is actually at risk into two kinds of heritage, because both are eroding together. There is tangible heritage: the physical ice formation, the cave, the mountain trails, the built shrine infrastructure, all materially altered by warming, unstable slopes and shifting snowlines. And there is intangible heritage: the ritual experience of the Yatra as generations have known it, the oral traditions passed down about the journey, the sense of continuity a pilgrim feels standing where their grandparents once stood. Climate change does not erode these separately. A landslide closes a route and disrupts a ritual calendar in the same event. A shrinking ice formation changes both the physical object of devotion and the felt experience of witnessing it. Culture and geology are, in a place like this, inseparable.
This matters economically in a very specific way, because tourism is the vector through which cultural erosion becomes economic erosion. Tourism contributes roughly seven per cent of Jammu and Kashmir’s GSDP today, with plans to substantially grow that share in the coming years. Religious tourism is not a peripheral part of that figure, it is close to the whole of it. In 2024 alone, Vaishno Devi drew 94.56 lakh (9.456 million) pilgrims and Amarnath 5.12 lakh (0.512 million), against roughly 2.36 crore (23.6 million) total tourist arrivals in the region that year, meaning two pilgrimage sites alone account for a striking share of all tourism activity. An economy this concentrated around two climate-exposed sites carries a structural vulnerability that deserves far more attention than it currently receives.
J&K is not an isolated case, and it helps to see the pattern elsewhere before returning home. In June 2024, more than 1,300 Hajj pilgrims lost their lives in Mecca as temperatures crossed 51°C, a tragedy the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report links with medium confidence to human-driven warming in the Arabian Peninsula, a region now heating at roughly six times its early-twentieth-century rate. Closer to home, the 2013 Kedarnath floods, triggered by a cloudburst compounded by glacial melt, caused catastrophic loss of life at another Himalayan Shiva shrine and cost Uttarakhand’s tourism economy an estimated $195 million. Globally, the World Meteorological Organization’s most recent State of the Global Climate report puts 2025 at roughly 1.43°C above pre-industrial levels, with sea level rise having more than doubled since satellite records began, from 2.1mm a year in the early 1990s to over 4mm a year now. Eight of the ten worst glacier mass balance years on record, in data going back to 1950, have occurred since 2016. None of this is abstract anymore. It is a mountain in Anantnag losing its sacred ice five days into a pilgrimage.
This is why treating climate change as a problem to be addressed only after the fact, through relief and reconstruction once a landslide or a heatwave has already struck, misses the larger point. What is genuinely at stake is mitigation, not compensation, because what erodes first is not infrastructure but meaning: a devotional practice measurably reshaping itself around a natural setting that can no longer be relied upon to remain as it always has.
Some conversations about protecting fragile pilgrimage ecologies point to low-volume, high-value tourism models as a solution, Bhutan is often cited as the reference point. But such models were designed for places without a mass-pilgrimage tradition to redirect, and applying them wholesale to Amarnath or Vaishno Devi, both anchored in religious obligation rather than discretionary travel, risks a different kind of harm: concentrating whatever tourism the region retains into its most visited sites, while quieter districts along the same mountain ranges, already dependent on the same nature based economy, see even less reach then. The more durable path is not fewer pilgrims funnelled into fewer places, but a pilgrimage economy planned around the tangible and intangible heritage it was built to protect, so that a route, a ritual and the ground beneath both are still standing for whoever comes next.
Dhairya Choudhary is an analyst at the Atlas Institute of International Affairs
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth