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Changing climate have a great impact on northern area of Pakistan’s environment and is more prone to environmental changes impacts than rest of the country due to its high elevation. However, the results of melting glaciers effect not only the local environment but also the whole country with frequent and heavy floods. Although recent technological development provided solutions of many problems to mankind, the pace of development in the field of environmental preservation technologies are much slower than needed.

Remote sensing (RS) from Satellites and Airplanes used in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are technologies that can aid in understanding the ongoing environmental processes as it enable us to obtain information about vast area and help researchers to observe, understand, forecast and suggest response to changes that occur.

It can be natural disasters or man-made disasters and human induced factors. Still analysis accuracy issues are there which plays a vital role for the formulation of any strategy. To achieve better results, object based analysis methods have been tested in here. Various algorithms are developed by the analysts to calculate the magnitude of land cover changes but must be evaluated for each environment that is under observation as for example mountainous areas. Here we have tried object-based methods in comparison with pixel based. Landslides, soil moisture, soil permeability, snow cover and vegetation cover that change during certain period of time can, with those methods, be effectively monitored. The findings were in short;

1) Object based analysis shows better accuracy ratio as compared to the pixel based analysis.

2) Slow but gradual depletion of snow/ice cover was confirmed in the study area of Karakoram region, Northern Pakistan.

3) Snow and ice melting catalyses the floods, mudslides, landslides and lake outburst episodes in the area during last two decades could be clearly observed in the analysed images and survey data.

4) Massive landslide/mudslide phenomena was observed in the study area in 2010 and 2012 in Landsat imagery. The artificial lake on the River Hunza was clearly observable in TM and ETM 2010, 2011 and 2012 imagery.

5) Bare soil area increased due to glacial retreat therefore gradual increase in the vegetation can be observed from the year 1992 to 2011.