#Glacier# Glacier Melting#UN#climate change#Glacier Melts
Glaciers in many regions will not survive the 21st century if they keep melting at the current rate, potentially jeopardising hundreds of millions of people living downstream, UN climate experts said on the first World Day for Glaciers.
Together with ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers lock up about 70 per cent of the world’s freshwater reserves. They are striking indicators of climate change as they typically remain about the same size in a stable climate.
But, with rising temperatures and global warming triggered by human-induced climate change, they are melting at unprecedented speed, said Sulagna Mishra, a scientific officer at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Hundreds of millions of livelihoods at risk
Last year, glaciers in Scandinavia, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and North Asia experienced the largest annual loss of overall mass on record. Glaciologists determine the state of a glacier by measuring how much snow falls on it and how much melt occurs every year, according to UN partner the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) at the University of Zurich.
In the 500-mile-long Hindu Kush mountain range, located in the western Himalayas and stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan, the livelihoods of more than 120 million farmers are under threat from glacial loss, Mishra explained.
