World Glacier Day: UN warns of ‘avalanche of cascading impacts’ as ice melt increases

Today marks the first ever World Glaciers Day, an occasion which the UN is using to spotlight these icy landscapes which are fast disappearing. 

Glaciers are now 9,000 billion tonnes lighter than when records began in 1975, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS). 

“This is equivalent to a huge ice block the size of Germany with a thickness of 25 metres,” says the service’s director, Prof. Dr. Michael Zemp.

As the planet warms up, glacier loss is accelerating. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)’s new State of the Global Climate report revealed that from 2022-2024, glaciers underwent their greatest three-year loss on record.

“Seven of the ten most negative mass balance years have occurred since 2016,” says WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo, referring to the difference between the amount of ice glaciers gain through snowfall and the amount they lose through seasonal melting. 

This is triggering an “avalanche of cascading impacts”, the UN agency warns, from flooding to water scarcity and sea-level rise. “Preservation of glaciers is not just an environmental, economic and societal necessity,” says Saulo, “It’s a matter of survival.”

There are more than 275,000 glaciers worldwide, covering approximately 700,000 square kilometres of ground. Alongside ice sheets, they store a whopping 70 per cent of global freshwater resources.

As the WMO puts it, high mountain regions are the world’s water towers. The depletion of glaciers threatens the supplies of hundreds of millions of people who live downstream and depend on the steady release of water stored over winter during the hottest and driest parts of the year. 

In the short term, glacier melt increases natural hazards like floods. In the longer term, glaciers