What Happens When the World Loses Its Glaciers?

Hello! We are The Core Climate Report and this week we are talking about how healthy the world’s ice caps are. More than 40% of global glacier mass loss recorded since the mid-1970s has occurred in the last decade, and six of the highest mass-loss years ever were recorded between 2018 and 2025.

The Arctic has warmed up to four times faster than the global average. Many of the world’s mountainous regions are also warming faster than the global average. For example, global warming of 1.5°C translates to between 1.8 and 2.2 °C average warming in the Hindu Kush Himalaya. The polar ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica are melting about six times faster today than in the 1990s.

If the projected warming level of 2.6°C is maintained over centuries, globally only 25% of today’s glacier ice is predicted to remain, with less than 5% remaining in southern Arctic Canada, Iceland, Russian Arctic, Scandinavia, Western Canada and the US.

Two new reports, one by scientists and another by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI) in coordination with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), have highlighted the cost of the world overshooting the 1.5°C threshold and, in fact, call for limiting warming to 2015 levels, that is only a 1-degree overshoot.

We had reported how people are coping in the warming Himalayas and how the growing number of landslides in Indian Himalayan states is upending lives and cutting off connectivity.

“There are no good outcomes in exceeding 1.5°C. To contain the global fallout and damage from ice loss in the world’s polar and mountain regions, overshoot needs to be kept to the absolute minimum. Temperatures must be returned to well below 1.5°C again as quickly as possible to reduce the risks,” said Dr James Kirkham, coordinating lead author of Overshoot and the Cryosphere together with a team of over 80 polar and mountain scientists. You can read the reports here and here.

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The Highlight Reel

• Cyclone Arnab made landfall on the Andhra Pradesh coast on October 28. At least seven people died in the state, and the government has estimated preliminary losses at Rs 4,764 crore, with about 3.5 lakh hectares of crops damaged. In Odisha, a landslide killed three people in Kandhamal district and more than 1,000 villages were flooded in Ganjam and Gajapati. You can read about the damage in Andhra Pradesh and in Odisha in these reports. India has improved its cyclone forecast accuracy over the years, the weather agency says. Read about it here.

• The Union Tribal Affairs Ministry has told the Calcutta High Court that Nicobarese leaders seeking to join a forest rights case on the Great Nicobar project are “neither necessary nor proper parties”. The four residents say the forest rights certifications relied on the consent of non-tribal settler communities, and that no gram sabha of tribal communities met on the forest diversion. The project, spread over 166 sq km, includes a port, township, airport and power plants. The court will next hear the case on November 25 and 26. You can read about it here and here.

• A non-governmental organization, Heat Watch, analysed the toll of the summer on Indians this year and found that, while the National Centre for Disease Control recorded only 20 deaths due to extreme heat this summer, Heat Watch could track 86 confirmed and 273 suspected heat deaths between March and July. This difference arises because India counts heatstroke deaths through four separate systems: the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), IMD, NCDC and the State Disaster Management (SDMA) authorities. It was only recently that the government agreed to make heatwaves as notified national disasters but aid will come with a lot of challenges, we had reported here.

The Bright Spot

India has a Project Dolphin to conserve both marine and riverine dolphins and a UN report acknowledged the recovery of the Ganges Dolphin in India.. “Research indicates that restoring just 15% of global priority areas [for biodiversity] could help avoid 60% of species extinctions. Documented successes among UN World Restoration Flagships include the recovery of species ranging from mountain gorillas in East Africa and jaguars in Brazil, to snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan and Ganges River dolphins in India,” the report noted. You can read about it here.