On the first-ever World Day for Glaciers on 21 March this year, high level events will be taking place in Paris and New York to focus on international efforts for cooperation to protect glaciers globally.
According to the UN World Water Development Report 2025, published today, approximately four billion people, or half the world’s population, experience severe water scarcity for at least part of the year. With two billion people depending on mountain waters, mountains provide up to 60% of the world’s annual freshwater flows.
More than one billion people live in mountainous regions, and over two billion directly rely on water originating from mountains for their drinking water, sanitation, and livelihoods. Glaciers and mountains should then be celebrated for their life sustaining features, but instead, on a rapidly warming planet, they are being lost around the world.
The dangers arising from unprecedented glacier melt are manifold. The report notes that: “Global warming is accelerating glacier melt, decreasing snow cover, increasing permafrost thaw, and prompting more extreme rainfall events and natural hazards. Water flows from mountains will become more erratic, uncertain and variable.”
Imminent peril facing mountains and glaciers
“Regardless of where we live, we all depend in some way on mountains and glaciers. But these essential natural water towers are facing imminent peril”, said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of Unesco. “This report demonstrates the urgent need for action and that the most effective solutions require a multilateral approach”
The report continued to highlight and emphasise the specific risks facing food and agriculture, human settlements, water dependent industries such as hydropower infrastructure, as well as dangers to mountain and highland ecosystems, as a result of climate disruption, pollution and unsustainable activities, such as rapid and unplanned urbanisation, which threaten water resources. It noted that “twenty-five countries – home to one-quarter of the world’s population – face ‘extremely high’ water stress every year”. Drinking water, as well as water for sanitation purposes, were both highlighted as impacting countries around the world.
The great water disruption
The Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, author of On Time and Water, a book focused on glacier loss, told Yorkshire Bylines: “The collapse of glaciers globally and the water towers for billions of people in mountain habitats are happening while sea level rise disrupts the lowland areas. When will we see that this leaves nobody unaffected? And we have just a narrow window to address this — until the problems overwhelm our abilities.
“We are the first generation that understands how we are melting glaciers, and at the same time understanding that glaciers are not only good for us, but vital for the life of billions of humans”.
Magnason wrote an obituary for the first glacier in Iceland to be lost to climate change in 2019 and termed the impact to mountains and glaciers as being a “great water disruption” – highlighting all the aspects of the water systems that are being threatened simultaneously.
“They call it global warming but it might be called something else. Like the great water disruption. We are seeing the disruption of all aspects of water, the sea level, the heat and the acidification, the rain and snow and disruption of seasons, the melting of the permafrost, amplification of hurricanes and now the global collapse of glaciers and mountain snow. We know what is happening and needs to be done. What prevents us from doing it?”
Global threats…
The dangers to glaciers and mountain regions tend to be unreported and overlooked until we have a major catastrophe. One, often ignored, factor is that many mountain ranges tend to be transboundary, so countries need to share information and work together with early warning systems and evacuation plans.
However, encouraging infrastructure investments in areas that are politically insecure can be difficult and conflict between national interests within transboundary water agreements have caused issues. With economic damage costs in mountain regions from flood and mass movements reaching tens of billions over the last 40 years, more finances going into prevention strategies and adaptation does seem more sensible.
A close examination of the most extensive systems in Asia and the Pacific reveals that this region contains some of the world’s highest mountains and that this so-called ‘third pole’ contains more ice and snow than any other region outside the Antarctic and Arctic. The report highlights that the ‘Third Pole’ is “one of the most biologically diverse and ecologically fragile areas in the world” as well as being the origin system of ten river systems which are vital for sustaining nearly two billion people.
In Europe and Central Asia, the dangers to downstream areas owing to earlier seasonal snow-melt and smaller glaciers, caused by climate change, threaten the availability of water in the summer seasons with serious consequences for millions of people.
… need global solutions
Whether we examine glaciers and mountain regions in Latin America, the Arab region or sub-Saharan Africa, the same threats play out. Even a reduction in overall volume from glaciers can lead to glaciers disappearing, with the Caribbean and Latin America especially hit hard, as mountains cover about one-third of this territory.
Working with indigenous peoples and local communities in terms of learning about how to be better stewards of water systems was urged as a method to improve the ability to respond to mountain and glacier changes.
Some initiatives have already been implemented to reduce disaster risks from glacial lake outburst floods. For example, in Central Asia, Unesco recently used $12mn to embed cooperation through glacial monitoring systems. Early warning systems are also being established. In Tanzania and Kenya, experts are mapping out the region’s aquifer systems to give an additional 100,000 people direct access to drinking water, as well as working on improving groundwater storage.
Cape Town, South Africa has already come perilously close to ‘Day Zero’- the point when the municipal water supply runs out. In 2024, both Mexico City and Bogotá also came close to their own ‘day zero.’ That a term even exists for this threat to the water supply of cities with tens of millions of inhabitants should be a major cause for alarm in itself.
We all live downstream
Through this first-ever World Glacier Day, followed closely by World Water Day on 22 March, it is hoped that more global action will be taken to protect these fragile environments, on which so many of us rely on for our basic human needs of water supply and sanitation. To continue to ignore the fact that mountains and glaciers provide fresh water to billions of people, as well as countless ecosystems, will only lead to untold suffering, when these glaciers disappear forever.
The end of the report gives a stark warning:
“Because nothing that happens in mountains stays in mountains.
In one way or another, we all live downstream”.
