The Tuyuksu Glacier, Kazakhstan, in 2018. BEN C. SOLOMON / NYT-REDUX-REA
If additional evidence was needed of the damage caused to the planet’s glaciers by global warming, Unesco provides it. On Thursday, November 3rd, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) will publish a report on the state of glaciers classified as part of the World Heritage of Humanity, i.e. H. An area of 66,000 km², accounting for 10% of the Earth’s glacier sites. And the observation is clear: a third of these glacier sites will have disappeared by 2050, regardless of the future climate scenario. If warming is limited to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, “the remaining two-thirds could be saved”.
This is the message UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay wants to convey at COP27, which will take place from 6 to 18 November in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. “This report is a call to action. Only a rapid reduction in current CO2 emissions can offer hope for saving glaciers and the extraordinary biodiversity that depends on them. COP27 will play a crucial role in bringing about solutions,” she argues.
In this study, carried out by Unesco and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with the participation of Swiss scientists and the CNRS, in particular the Laboratory for Space Geophysics and Oceanography Studies (Legos), are the World Heritage sites Glaciers have been studied for twenty years, between 2000 and 2020. That is 18,600 glaciers present at fifty of the 1,154 Unesco monitored sites (including 257 natural sites). “While Unesco has fifty glacial sites, each of them can encompass multiple glaciers,” explains Tales Carvalho Resende, program manager at the UNESCO World Heritage Center and lead author of the report. Thus, the largest of these sites in Alaska has more than 3,000 glaciers. This study made it possible to quantify their decline due to an exclusive cause for the United Nations Organization: the increase in temperatures.
“Markers of climate change”
These glaciers lose an average of 58 billion tons of ice each year, equivalent to the combined annual amount of water consumed by France and Spain, and contribute nearly 5% of global sea level rise, Unesco says. A planetary catastrophe as “50% of humanity depends on glaciers for a source of water for domestic use, agriculture or even hydroelectric power”.
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