You are listening to "Story of mobility". A podcast about the international experiences of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. In this episode of "Story of mobility", we welcome Zahra Hussain, a Pakistani architect and human geographer, who talks about her research into mountain communities in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, faced with climate change and infrastructure development. My name is Zahra Hussain, I'm from Pakistan. I've been trained as an architect and a human geographer. I've set up an organization called Laajverd about 15 years ago. And, through that organization, we have been working mostly in the mountain communities of Pakistan, which is also known as the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, to work with local communities and to understand how their heritage and their lives are arranged and transforming, with the climate change and infrastructural development. My research is basically based on how mountain communities are grappling with the effects of climate change and large infrastructural development in the Hindu Kush Himalayan mountain region, which is in the northern part of Pakistan. I'm particularly interested in how mountain communities negotiate their everyday life amidst these challenges, especially by looking at how they're using their land and how they are negotiating their livelihoods. In the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, I'm looking at multiple communities across the region. So I'm particularly working with the Kalash people and then I'm working with some communities in Gilgit-Baltistan and then I'm also focusing on a community in Gojal Valley. So geologically speaking, the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountain region is considered a very young mountain range, which means that they're continuing to grow and they are fragile spaces where you also encounter a lot of landslides and the land isn't really stable. This fragility is is exacerbated by climate change and rising temperatures, because you also have a lot of glaciers, which are damming these glacial lakes inside them and once you know the temperature rises, the walls become very weak and then you have these lakes that burst, which causes a lot of glacier lake outburst flooding. This flooding has not only destroyed a lot of fields and infrastructure that local communities have developed in their mountain valleys but the rising temperature also affects their orchards and crops that they grow in the area. So climate change is really affecting these mountain communities and their lives and livelihoods as well. With respect to tourism development, since the Covid 19, a lot of domestic tourists have started going up into the mountains and sort of touring in these valleys, which has also affected the built infrastructure in these areas. So a lot of small hotels and guesthouses have come up and people are seen to be selling off their agricultural land in order to build hotels. So the whole sort of way in which people are used to living in these areas is rapidly changing. This has a lot of effects and this is something that I'm looking at in my research, in terms of how people are negotiating their everyday life and how they're trying to make do and live on amidst these changes, which are not just due to climate change, but also the influx of the tourism industry. So the research that we do in mountain areas, I also run an organization called Laarjverd. And for the last 15 years we have been working in mountain communities. This research is…