UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : WMO Press Conference: State of world’s glaciers

Good, Good afternoon, everybody.

Thank you very much indeed for attending this, the press conference of the World Meteorological Organisation.

We're holding this press conference ahead of World Glaciers Day.

It's the first ever World Glaciers Day this year.

It's taking place on the 21st of March and it's to highlight the importance of glaciers and the impact of their retreat.

We sent you the embargoed press release this morning.

It will be translated into all, all official UN languages hopefully in the next couple of couple of days.

So you know you should have it in in French or Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

To help in your reporting.

There are a number of activities foreseen for World Glaciers Day.

The UN water and UNESCO will be releasing the World Water Development Report that is also to coincide with World Water Day on the 22nd of March.

So if you need any additional resources, please, please don't hesitate to to contact to contact me.

This press conference will be in English, although both my experts, well two of my experts, German speaking.

So on the right I have Professor Stefan Ulenbrook, he is Director of Water and Cryosphere at the World Meteorological Organisation.

And then in the centre we have Professor Michael Semp, who is based in Zurich and he is director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

On the far right is Sulanya Solania.

[Other language spoken]

Sorry, sorry.

Sulania, who is a scientific officer in at, at WMO and as an expert also in in hydrology and in glaciers.

The press release that we issued today, there are quite a few new findings on it and we're doing this to put it in the context of the World Glaciers Day.

It does also draw on some findings which were published in a report from from Nature earlier earlier this year.

I'm saying this just in the interests of Full disclosure.

We will be presenting a few slides, but first and foremost, I will hand over the floor to to Stefan Ullenbrook, who can, who can set the scene for you.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much, Claire.

Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, dear friends of Glaciers, it's a pleasure to say a few words to introduce the topic to provide some framing to the International Year of Glaciers Preservation, which is 2025, as well as the world glacier, the World First World Day on 4 glaciers, which we will celebrate on the 21st of March.

The year as well as the day is Co facilitated from the UN side by UNESCO as well as WMO.

But it's not really the two year end organisation is very lively community behind it.

We have some 200 organisations which are involved in various task forces and support they support glaciers are among the most visible and also most dramatically changing indicators of climate change.

Some colleagues, you can call them these are icons of climate change and preservation of glaciers is really critical issue.

Glaciers, as you will see in the coming minutes, are absolutely central elements of the global energy, water as well as the climate cycles.

And to understand them is absolutely critical.

And they are changing.

They are changing quickly.

Professor sample in a minute, explain the latest numbers we have.

But globally we, we can say we have some 275,000 glaciers left disappearing quickly.

And in total, the glaciers together with the ice masses on the ice shelves of Greenland as well as Antarctica, it's about 70% of all the freshwater is stored in in the ice mass.

Important to note is that WMO only last month declared 2024 as the warmest year on record after a number of record-breaking month with highest temperatures.

And we can negotiate many things.

And here at the UN, we, we love to negotiate many things, but we cannot negotiate physical laws.

And one is the melting point of ice.

This is unnegotiable.

And then in, in increasing warming, warming climate is contributing to more ice as well as snow melt.

The accelerated warming as uh, resulted in, in dramatic changes that Professor Sample explain us in a minute.

The implications of this are multifaceted, which includes the the threatening of the long term water resources.

So long term water security is really at stake here for, for another, just a few millions, it's literally hundreds of millions directly in the Hindu Kush, Himalaya region.

It, it was estimated it could be up to two, almost 2 billion.

And globally in the Internet economy, it's it's everyone around the world who's indirectly impacted from these dramatic changes.

It's putting at risk the water supplies, it's putting at risk food security, energy, energy security, as well as the ecosystem services that that water resources and other resources provide.

But you shouldn't also forget the the, the social, the cultural as well as the spiritual values glaciers have.

The international year provides an opportunity to raise awareness for, for the critical role of glaciers and snow and ice in the climate and water system, as well as the the the impacts for society, which I summarised before.

It's also an opportunity to to share best practises about knowledge, to share best practises about adapting to these changes and and mitigating it's impact.

Also to strengthening we, we believe this is very important to strengthening the the research and monitoring efforts to better understand these systems.

And if you understand them better, if you have better data, we also able to predict better and provide products and services that guide society.

The international year, I said it before, some 200 agencies are organisations are involved.

There's a **** level Advisory Board as well As for task forces that deal with different aspects.

We're happy to expand on that in the in the discussion.

Let me quickly round it up with a few things about how WMO, the World Meteorological Organisation, is contributing to this topic.

First, I would like to mention that the WMO has elevated the topic of cryosphere, which includes great glaciers as well as snow and ice, CIS, permafrost, ice on lakes and everywhere as a as a key priority, as a so-called topped strategic priority.

It is also advocating for stronger international collaboration when it comes to monitoring and understanding and predicting these changes.

Programmes like the Global Cryosphere Watch or the Global Climate Observing Observing System, Ticos are a key programmes that help us to produce and to deliver essential data and forecast to, to better understand and predict changes and therefore support decision making to, to understand and also to advise on the changes of water resources.

We have a a programme called Hydro SOS, that's the hydrological status and Outlook system, which is another programme that really helps us to assess the impacts on the water resources and therefore to advise policy and decision making processes.

Finally, WMO is heavily involved in Co leading the international initiative called Early Warning for All, which aims that everyone around the world is protected by an early warning system by the by 2027, which is just around the corner.

And therefore, glacier related hazards are also an essential part of that, particularly things like the glacier lake outburst floods or or landslides that also can be triggered by glacier melt.

Colleagues, let me let me conclude, I'm just want to want to stress that preserving glaciers is not only an environmental imperative, it's really a survival strategy.

We need to advance our scientific knowledge.

We need to advance us through better observing systems, through better forecasts and better early warning systems for for the planet and the people.

Only then we can protect our water supplies, the livelihoods of people as well as ecosystems for future generation.

The WMO is fully committed to working with its members and partners to strengthening climate resilience, to secure water resources and to preserve glaciers and the well-being for all.

[Other language spoken]

Now I'll hand over to to you again, Claire, I believe, or directly to Professor.

I in turn will hand over to to Michael Samson.

Michael, over to you.

[Other language spoken]

Thanks 2 of you for handing over.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome to the International Year of Glacier Preservation and the 21st March, the World Day for Glaciers.

My name is Michael Tim.

I've been studying glaciers for 25 years and since 2010 I'm the director of the WORK Glacier Monitoring Service.

This is an international organisation based in Switzerland that for more than 130 years has been coordinating glacier monitoring and basically is bringing back together all the observations from around the world.

In the next few slides, I would like to touch briefly on four key questions when it comes to glaciers and this world's day for Glaciers.

So first of all, how many glaciers do we have?

How fast are they melting?

Why does the melting matter at all?

And last but not least, can we still preserve our glaciers?

And then I have an additional bonus point is are we going to present the glacier of the year that we honoured this year?

So how many glaciers do we have?

The the baseline we have is an inventory of all the glaciers with a baseline of the year 2000 glacier distributed from the tropics to the polar regions and all together they cover about 700,000 square kilometre.

That is the size of about twice Germany.

That these 275,000 glaciers covered together may be worthwhile to notice that these numbers, they exclude the two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which are, you could say, giant glaciers of continental size.

So how fast are they melting?

That's a bit more tricky than just to do the inventory of how much is out there.

So basically the work Glacier Monitoring Service for more than a century has compiled observations on glacier changes from the in situ measurements on one side and from remote sensing or the other side.

So through a network of glaciologists in more than 40 countries or all countries that are active in glacier monitoring, we're collecting in an annual call for data these observations, put them in a database, analyse them and share them with everybody to address global questions such as climate change.

How fast are these glaciers changing?

So here come basically the latest numbers.

They're still warm, just out of press.

Basically what you see here is a climate stripe illustrating the global glacier mass change from 1976 towards 2024.

And you see basically years with glacier mass gain, a few ones that are marked in blue.

This means that the glaciers did gain in mass a little bit and towards 24 the the stripe we're getting more and more red, which means more and more mass loss accumulating in the extreme year 23 where we lost about 540 giga tonnes in a single year from all the glaciers.

Around now 2024, we lost 450 giga tonnes from all the glaciers together.

It was not the most extreme year, but it was ranked number four of the years with most glacier mass loss.

And if you look at the past years, we actually had like the five most negative years on record we did have in the past six years.

So you see this increasing dramatic glacier loss from year to year.

If you sum up all the loss of eyes that we had, you can show this in a graph from a cumulative mass change since 1975 to present times.

And we actually see that in the 1980s and up to 1990s, glaciers were in kind.

They already were losing a bit of mass, but were kind of in a around the zero line.

But then since then we had an increasing loss by glacier ice year by year by year, accumulating in this incredible number of about 9000 gigatonnes of ice lost since 1975.

Now this is just a huge number and hard to imagine.

So again, if you take the example of Germany, it would be an ice block of the size of Germany with a thickness of 25 metre.

That is the ice that we lost since 9775 from glaciers.

You also can convert that in sea level contribution.

How much did glacier melt run off through the rivers into sea?

How much did that add to sea level rise?

And so accumulated again, this is about 25 millimetres of sea level rise, or currently a bit more than one millimetre each year.

Now you might say 1 millimetre is not exactly a lot.

Doesn't sound much, right?

But it's a small number with a big impact.

Each additional millimetre of sea level rise exposes an additional 2 to 300,000 people to annual flooding.

So small number, big impact.

And yes, talking about impact, why does glacier melt matter?

I would say we can summarise that on three scales.

On the local scale, glacier change impacts the hazard situation.

Glaciers are melting back very often they form lakes which are then prone to lake outburst floods and and threatened downstream villages.

The the retreating glacier tongue also re wheels, basically bare rock or sediments that can collapse and that comes all together also with the warming permafrost.

So this is locally really increasing the hazard situation at the regional level.

Glaciers are important water resources, so in dry and hot seasons, glacier runoff is often the only water left.

This is not everywhere.

The same hotspots of water availability from glaciers or Central Asia and the Central Andes were glaciers in the hottest and driest months are often the only water resource.

And what happens on the glaciers doesn't stay on the glaciers.

It goes downstream and as we mentioned before, rises sea levels.

So glaciers are the second largest contributor to sea level rise.

Number one is the warming of the water.

Warming water expands and rises sea level.

But then comes the glacier melt.

And this will be the main driver of over the next decades, the the melt of the phone glaciers.

Afterwards come the two ice sheets that I mentioned in the beginning, green and ice sheet that is already melting now on directly cut that is still not contributing so much.

So for the next decades, the glaciers are the drivers for the sea level rise.

When we talk about the next centuries, it's the ice sheets that we have to worry about.

Can we still preserve our glaciers?

He released basically all the 19 regions.

We see this melt happening in in all the regions, but not at the same time.

And and region by region it varies a little bit.

When you look at Central Europe, actually it has increased dramatically, especially over the last years.

And in the Alps, we had two years, 22 and 23, which alone melted 10% of the remaining ice.

And this is something that we really see from our data that we have many regions where the current melt rates.

So the amount of ice that we lose per year is more than 1%.

That means glaciers on the current melt conditions cannot survive the present century.

So this is in the European Alps, this is in the Western Canada and US, this is in the Caucasus, this is in New Zealand.

This is in the tropics then.

[Other language spoken]

Glaciers might disappear on the current melting rates in within the century.

But there's a second bad news.

Even if these glaciers are gone, the glacier melt continues in the polar regions will kick in and so will continue to melt and and further increase sea levels together with the ice sheets in the next centuries.

[Other language spoken]

Can we prevent that?

One example here is Ronic lecture in Switzerland that is suffering a lot on the climate conditions.

And here we have this famous fleece, these blankets that cover the glacier or actually the ice cave in the glacier.

And some people say glacier preservation you might do with such a fleece that reduces the radiation and, and reduces the melting.

And of course that works very locally, very short term.

But that's definitely not the solution because on the on the large scale, this is too expensive, logistically not possible and it brings too much infrastructure, textile and and and disturbance into nature anyway.

[Other language spoken]

We have to reduce the greenhouse gases because glacier melt is through the rising temperatures directly related to the the increase in greenhouse gases.

And their reduction is, is really the one measure that preserves can preserve a part of our glaciers.

And here we actually see really every 10th of a degree of warming that we can avoid will prevent us from 2.5 millimetre of sea level rise from glaciers alone.

And again, which prevents about 500,000 of people from exposure to annual flooding.

So part of the glacier is lost because also the of the late response of glaciers to climate change.

But still by acting and cutting down the greenhouse gas emissions, we can preserve part of our glaciers and save ourselves from the downstream impacts and the relating costs.

So I think it's just time to act.

I don't want to Start Stop with this kind of semi negative message.

There's still some beauty and hope in the system.

So we have, we heard, we have the World Day for Glaciers now the first time this year, but this will continue.

And so we will from now on announce at this World Day for Glaciers the Glacier of the Year.

And with that, we would like to honour the beauty of glaciers around the world, but also we would like to honour the scientists that have spent decades in monitoring these glaciers and measuring how how they're and understanding how they react, how and how they change.

And this year in the South Cascade Glacier that is located in the Cascade Range that they're going down from British Columbia all down the the West Coast of the US, California S Cascade Glacier is based up in Washington.

It's been monitored since 1952.

So with that, it is the longest mass balance monitoring programme in the Western Hemisphere and is done by our US colleagues from the US Geological Survey, reporting this data as a contribution not only to the national monitoring, but also to the international glacier and climate monitoring for many decades.

And with that, I thank you for your time, attention and interest in glaciers and I'm happy to answer questions together with my colleagues from the panel.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much.

We will be making the slides from this available on the Trello board along with other other resources for World Glacier Day.

So, so hopefully that what you'll find that useful.

So if I could have any questions, please, just please introduce yourself by by by affiliation.

Oh, and, and just as before, before I forget, glaciers are one of the key climate indicators which the World Meteorological Organisation, the monitors in its State of the Global Climate report.

We will be releasing the 2024 State of the Global Climate report on Wednesday of next week.

So the, the main, the focus is not only on glaciers.

It is, it is one part of that report, but just to, just to let you know, so and yes, yes, thank you for taking my question.

[Other language spoken]

I'm working with the AFP in Geneva as I have one question.

But, but, but first, at the beginning, you, you mentioned that some elements were new while others are more figures are known.

So I was wondering if from the press release, if you could let us know what elements, what figures are, are new.

So that would be very helpful for, for journalists.

And then the question that has been discussed in in France and certainly in other countries about the, the, the fact that the disappearance of glaciers, do you think that it will create the need to, to have huge reservoirs in water reservoirs in the countries in like those big basins that were pretty much discussed in France.

So if you think that would be useful for the human consumption as well for the agriculture, what is your perspective on that?

[Other language spoken]

So maybe I can start with the first point of your question.

What is new in the in the press release?

So what is new is really the latest number from the year 24 and how much glacier melt happened around the globe, right.

So we have we collect this data in annual calls for data and every year basically we get the measurements from the past year and and 24.

This is what is brand new.

And then this is put in local context and in compared with global satellite measurements to scale up from the few 100 glaciers with in situ observations to the whole glacialisation, right.

Do you want to take a second?

[Other language spoken]

And briefly on the, on the water resources, yes, glaciers are melting very rapidly, you know, depending on how you define it.

But we, we learned that 2024, actually it was the, the, the, the final glacier of Venezuela who melted, that melted away.

Also, Slovenia became a glacier free nation.

It's a, it's a bit of a discussion on the and how exactly you define it.

But if it is, you're last year, but it, it does matter.

Also, other countries are on the way to, to lose their glaciers very rapidly.

Therefore these water resources are are diminishing.

But the downstream water resources also depend on the on the precipitation and the whole **** mountain range.

So it's so the snow is very important, not only the ice, but also the the rainfall doing, doing when, when the, when the temperatures above 0° and then also the groundwater recharge and therefore the the whole water towers.

We also like to call the **** mountain regions are changing through climate change.

One implication is then the water resources are diminished downstream and therefore your idea with storing more water through reservoirs is a is an obvious one.

Also to to keep the water back in the landscape, make it available for for during the summer season and in the temperate climate, for instance, for irrigation when the summer or energy production when the when the demand is there.

We need to realise that building reservoirs has other environmental and social implications.

Building big reservoirs obviously is, is a major, major intervention to the nature.

Sometimes people are living there as well.

So it also has social, social implications.

So need to be, you know, evaluated how much this investment can be defended also from a social environmental impact point of view.

Furthermore, beside a few big reservoirs, there's also other ways to try to store water in the landscapes who in a decentralised way to to to infiltrate that into the groundwater to keep it in, in in wetland storage.

You know, to to just so-called nature based solutions are increasingly popular in that way to to just retain the water and the landscape to to minimise the the the water scarcity downstream.

Yes, yes, by do you wish you could give examples of these natural I don't know and nothing for still term natural places to to keep the the water.

[Other language spoken]

We often we we in a simplified way, we often say it's grey infrastructure.

This is concrete, big walls and reservoir.

While it's a so-called green infrastructure.

That's the natural infrastructure where we utilise storage capacity in the in the in the catchments in the in the landscape.

You might want to call that this could be groundwater infiltration sites where we we force the water, you know, by by infiltrating into aquifers.

Aquifers are groundwater bodies or in a decentralised many small ponds to to retain the water.

Also through land use manipulation you can try to keep more water that the rain doesn't run off quickly to forest reforestation efforts.

You also try to infiltrate more water into the ground and therefore to retain more water in the soil and in the groundwater.

These are different types of nature based solution.

In in urban areas, there's many other solutions like green roofs you might have heard of that people to avoid urban flooding.

And also there's parks that, that retain water.

There's playgrounds that have a permeable concrete where water can infiltrate to, to just retain more water back.

So there's different, different ways for that.

Just to just to add to what Stefan said, managed aquifer recharge very commonly used for nature based solutions.

This is a common practise already being done.

For example for storing excess of desalinated water rather than throwing it back to the ocean, it's often then stored in the aquifer through managed aquifer recharge.

Also for treated wastewater, this is a very commonly used practise.

But for the excess of melting melted glacier water that we are going to get, we are getting now and is anticipated to be coming in the next year.

This is also one of the good solutions that we should be looking or we could be looking at also.

Just to add one more point to to Michael's answer on the latest results, the 2020, the 2024 data also shows that for the third consecutive year, we saw that all the glaciers around the world were losing mass.

This was the third year in in the row.

[Other language spoken]

Yeah, just a follow up on the on, on the previous question, It's you can just introduce.

[Other language spoken]

Sorry, Jeremy Launch, I'm working for the French public radio.

It seems that we we are more concerned maybe even here about the melting glaciers.

We're living in Switzerland and we know how I forgot how many glaciers we have here.

But it seems that though we are mostly concerned, we are also sometimes unaware of the consequences of the melting of glaciers because we think that oh, we're on the Alps and we always have waterfall anyway.

So can you just give a few more examples of what it means for Switzerland and nearby countries?

France, everyone living on the on the run valley, for instance, what it means not to have any more glaciers by the end of the century or even before that.

I start and hand over there the, the, the changes are really dramatic and the impacts for, for society are dramatic as well.

You might remember that we had the summer 20/22.

[Other language spoken]

It was a heat wave in, in the whole of Western Europe.

This was the year Michael had on his slide when in two years about 10% of the mass of the glaciers in, in Central Alps or in Switzerland and surrounding areas where were melting in a way and in, in two years, 10%.

It's really dramatic.

This was also the year where it was so hot and umm, where the nuclear power plant, many, several nuclear power plants in France had to be shut down because of the lack of cooling water.

So it was such a dry and hot area time where, where, where there were energy supply problems.

Something in, in Western Europe we didn't experience for some time.

Now it's because of the lack of cooling water.

So this is just one example.

By changing the hydrological regimes or the water availability, it has impacts on energy security.

Another one, if you look globally at the water users, 70% of the water resources which we use with the withdrawals that we take out of the system are used for irrigation to produce food.

In some countries in Central Asia, it's more than 90% or more than 90% of all the water that they withdraw from rivers and many rivers, few groundwater bodies as well are used for agriculture.

So if, if this, if this availability changes, this has huge implications for, for downstream, for, for, for food security around the world.

The opposite is also true flooding, though it's, it's, it can also dry as the one extreme flooding is the other extreme.

Let me share another story.

There was in 2012 or 13, there was a major flooding in Bangkok, Bangkok in Asia.

About 25% of the global hard disc supply is it was in the area of Bangkok because of major flooding and inundation.

Bangkok area have been there maybe the it's very flat area.

So if the flooding is there, it's water standing and it's difficult to get away for.

So there was inundation for for weeks.

And that that Hanford the the industry in in producing hard disc and 25% of the global hard disc were were supplied in that area.

That leads to to increase of, of computer prices that led to, to motor bill challenges in automobile construction because there was a demand for, for artists.

And you see in a globalised interconnected economy, it, these changes are impacting everyone.

Others are the, the spiritual, cultural changes which which were briefly mentioned that also impact people.

Navigation is another one if the water levelled in the rivers is not **** enough.

I'm originally from Germany and we had in this hot summer, which I mentioned the river Rhine.

We couldn't ship there anymore for several months.

So no transportation on, on, on, on the main rivers anymore because of too low water levels.

And so you see all is interconnected.

But I didn't speak about fishery and hunting, but there there are several more implication in various sectors that that depend on these water resources.

Maybe 11 point to add here, especially for the European Alps, I believe often we forget that here actually the impact of of climate change is, is more than on the global average.

So we have in the Alps about twice the warming of the global average.

And then glaciers are not the only things that are changing, right?

We heard that they're part of the essential climate variables.

So it's one out of many.

So it goes along with the permafrost melting, with the heat waste, with the drying of our vegetation, with the the fire that happening at the same time.

So we get a cluster of problems that we have to face at the same time.

And I believe that's that is really a part of this underestimated that we are.

We are facing a whole, whole chain of troubles that we have to address at the same time.

And this is causing tremendous costs.

Do I have any questions on the platform?

Can't see any.

Could you just raise your hand if you if you do?

No, I can't see any.

Are there any more questions in in the room?

[Other language spoken]

And thank you very much indeed for your attention.

Thank you for coming.

I know you're very busy with the Human Rights Council, so we appreciate, we appreciate it.

[Other language spoken]

Thank you very much.

[Other language spoken]

WMO Press Conference: State of world’s glaciers - 13 March 2025