The United Nations reported on Friday that all 19 glacier regions worldwide experienced a net loss of mass in 2024 for the third consecutive year, emphasizing that preserving the planet’s glaciers is now a matter of “survival.”
According to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), five of the past six years have seen record-breaking glacier retreat. Speaking on the first-ever World Day for Glaciers, WMO chief Celeste Saulo stressed that glacier conservation is not just an environmental, economic, or societal need but a fundamental survival issue.
Beyond the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, over 275,000 glaciers cover roughly 700,000 square kilometers globally, but they are rapidly shrinking due to climate change for consecutive years. The WMO highlighted that in the 2024 hydrological year, every glacier region recorded mass loss for the third year in a row, with a total reduction of 450 billion tonnes. This made it the fourth-worst year on record, with 2023 being the worst.
Between 2022 and 2024, glaciers suffered their largest three-year decline ever recorded. While some regions, such as the Canadian Arctic and Greenland’s peripheral glaciers, experienced moderate losses in 2024, glaciers in Scandinavia, Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and North Asia faced their worst losses on record.
Data from the Swiss-based World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) estimates that since records began in 1975, glaciers outside Greenland and Antarctica have lost over 9,000 billion tonnes of ice—equivalent to an ice block the size of Germany with a thickness of 25 meters.
At the current rate of melting, many glaciers in western Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, central Europe, the Caucasus, and New Zealand are unlikely to survive the 21st century. Glaciers, along with ice sheets, hold about 70% of the world’s freshwater, and their disappearance would threaten water supplies for millions of people downstream.
The UN insists that the only way to address this crisis is by reducing greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming. “While many things can be negotiated, the physical laws governing ice melt cannot,” said Stefan Uhlenbrook, WMO’s water and cryosphere director.
He declined to comment on the return of US President Donald Trump, a climate change skeptic who previously withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
