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The purpose of this paper is to understand local perceptions on climate change and its impacts on biodiversity, rangeland, agriculture and human health.

A household survey with 300 interviewees and focus group discussions with key stakeholders were conducted and validated at two steps, using the climate data from the nearest weather stations and reviewing literatures, to correlate the local perceptions on climate change and its impacts.

Majority of the respondents reported an increase in temperature and change in the precipitation pattern with increased hazardous incidences such as floods, avalanches and landslides. Climate change directly impacted plant distribution, species composition, disease and pest infestation, forage availability, agricultural productivity and human health risks related to infectious vector-borne diseases.

Because of the remoteness and difficult terrain, there are insufficient local weather stations in the mountains providing inadequate scientific data, thus requiring extrapolation from nearest stations for long-term climate data monitoring.

The research findings recommend taking immediate actions to develop local climate change adaptation strategies through a participatory approach that would enable local communities to strengthen their adaptive capacity and resilience.

Local knowledge-based perceptions on climate change and its impacts on social, ecological and economic sectors could help scientists, practitioners and policymakers to understand the ground reality and respond accordingly through effective planning and implementing adaptive measures including policy formulation.

This research focuses on combining local knowledge-based perceptions and climate science to elaborate the impacts of climate change in a localised context in Rakaposhi Valley in Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan.

Disasters and armed conflict often co-occur, but does that imply that disasters trigger or fuel conflict? In the small but growing body of literature attempting to answer this question, divergent findings indicate the complex and contextual nature of a potential answer to this question. The purpose of this study is to contribute a robust cross-country analysis of the co-occurrence of disaster and conflict, with a particular focus on the potential role played by disaster.

Grounded in a theoretical model of disaster–conflict co-occurrence, this study merges data from 163 countries between 1990 and 2017 on armed conflict, disasters and relevant control variables (low human development, weak democratic institutions, natural resource dependence and large population size/density).

The main results of this study show that, despite a sharp increase in the co-occurrence of disasters and armed conflict over time, disasters do not appear to have a direct statistically significant relation with the occurrence of armed conflict. This result contributes to the understanding of disasters and conflicts as indirectly related via co-creation mechanisms and other factors.

This study is a novel contribution, as it provides a fresh analysis with updated data and includes different control variables that allow for a significant contribution to the field.