Spatial assessment of hazards clustering and hydropower infrastructure exposure in Baltistan Region, Pakistan

Hydropower infrastructure in glacier-fed mountain regions is exposed to interacting hydrometeorological, geomorphic, cryospheric, and seismic hazards, yet plant-level evidence linking these hazards to documented infrastructure disruption remains limited. We compiled a field-verified, asset-level dataset for 46 hydropower stations in Baltistan, northern Pakistan, combining administrative repair or disruption records, inflation-adjusted repair expenditure, and GIS-derived relative hazard-conditioning indicators for 2010–2019 and 2024–2025. The archive contained 150 repair or disruption records, and 25 of the 46 stations experienced at least one recorded disruption event during 2010–2019. Flash floods were the most frequently assigned hazard category, followed by landslides, heavy snowfall, rockfall, earthquakes, and glacial lake outburst floods. Documented damage and repair expenditure were concentrated in power-generation units, headworks, transformers, and penstocks. Installed capacity increased from 17.18 MW in 2009 to 65.319 MW in 2025. Skardu contained more than half of the regional installed capacity despite having a lower relative hazard-conditioning score than Shigar, which recorded the largest raw disruption burden and the highest relative hazard-conditioning score. This mismatch shows that recent capacity expansion has increased the amount of infrastructure potentially exposed to mountain hazards, highlighting the need to integrate hazard screening into future investment and upgrading decisions.