World Day for Glaciers: Urgent action needed to preserve glaciers amid climate change issues

As part of the UN International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, the first World Day for Glaciers aims to highlight the environmental, societal, and economic impacts of glacier shrinkage. Glaciers are crucial for water resources, climate regulation, and supporting ecosystems, making their rapid retreat a critical global issue. Recent research paints a sobering picture, showing that glaciers are disappearing faster than ever before. This blog explores the latest findings on glacier mass loss, the far-reaching consequences of this trend, and why limiting global temperature rise is essential for preserving these critical ice masses.

How have glaciers changed in the 21st century? 

Glaciers and ice caps outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are shrinking rapidly across the globe. A significant community effort by the Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE) has recently revealed that glaciers lost a total of approximately 6,500 gigatonnes of ice (1 gigatonne equals a billion tonnes) between 2000 and 2023. Over that period, the rate of mass loss from glaciers increased by between 26 and 46%, with record mass loss of around 548 gigatonnes in 2023.

All regions across the globe are experiencing glacier mass loss, but these changes are not equal as some regions contribute disproportionately to the total. Glaciers in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic contributed the most to total global glacier mass loss between 2000 and 2023, with losses from these two regions accounting for 42% of the total losses worldwide.

How are glaciers predicted to change by 2100?

Over the coming decades, glaciers will experience continued retreat, thinning, and mass loss. Further shrinkage of glaciers is already committed due to delays in the response of glaciers to climate change. That is, glaciers will lose mass irrespective of future greenhouse gas emissions and temperature increases.

Depending on future emissions and temperature increases, recent glacier modelling studies predict that between about one quarter (in a low emission scenario) and one half (high emission scenario) of global glacier mass could be lost by 2100.

It is predicted that even if temperature increases are limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, around half of all glaciers could still disappear entirely by the end of this century.

The future preservation and survival of glaciers will ultimately be determined by increases in temperatures over the course of this century. The latest research suggests that, for every additional 0.1°C increase between +1.5°C and +3.0°C scenarios, there will eventually be a further 2.0% loss in global glacier mass.

Why are these changes important?

The observed and continued shrinkage of glaciers will have profound environmental, societal, and economic impacts across the world.

Accelerated glacier mass loss over this century will pose a threat to long-term water security. Up to 1.9 billion people worldwide currently rely on glacial meltwater for agriculture, drinking water, hydropower, and ecosystem services. As glaciers disappear, communities will lose critical water resources.

Glacier mass loss contributed more to sea-level rise than the Greenland Ice Sheet between 2002 and 2021 (21% versus 17%), and glaciers will continue to be significant contributors to sea-level rise in this century. This will contribute to increased risks of coastal erosion and flooding, impacting millions of people across the globe.

Moreover, glacier retreat will increase risks of glacier-related hazards, such as glacial lake outburst floods and landslides. These hazards have the potential to cause significant impacts and wide-scale devastation.

What can be done to preserve glaciers?

To preserve the world’s glaciers, we need decisive government action and policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions and minimise future temperature increases. As individuals, we can all make changes to reduce our carbon footprints, but government intervention is the most effective way to limit the disappearance of glaciers in this century.

This is why research being conducted by researchers at the University of Nottingham and other institutions across the world is so important. By monitoring and modelling the impacts of climate change, we can accurately predict the significant consequences of future glacier loss. This provides governments, politicians, NGOs and other groups with the evidence they need to make the decisions that will allow us to limit the impacts of climate change.

Through decisive action, we can preserve our glaciers and safeguard vital resources.

References

1. The GlaMBIE Team, 2025. Community estimate of global glacier mass changes from 2000 to 2023. Nature 639, 382–388.
2. Rounce, D.R., et al., 2023. Global glacier change in the 21st century: Every increase in temperature matters. Science 379, 78–83.
3. Zekollari, H., et al., 2024. Twenty-first century global glacier evolution under CMIP6 scenarios and the role of glacier-specific observations. The Cryosphere 18, 5045–5066.
4. Zekollari, H. et al., 2025. Glacier preservation doubled by limiting warming to 1.5°C. Earth ArXiv Preprint.
5. Immerzeel, W.W., et al., 2020. Importance and vulnerability of the world’s water towers. Nature 577, 364–369.
6. IPCC Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Cambridge University Press.