Nearly half of all glaciers at World Heritage sites may vanish by 2100, if greenhouse gas emission is not cut down significantly, a new study has said.
Touted as the first-ever global study of UNESCO World Heritage glaciers, the research published recently in the American Geophysical Union (AGU’s) journal Earth’s Future said that glaciers at 21 of the 46 World Heritage sites will be iceless by 2100.
“Losing these iconic glaciers would be a tragedy and have major consequences for the availability of water resources, sea level rise and weather patterns,” Peter Shadie, Director of the International Union for Conservation (ICUN) of Nature’s World Heritage Program, said in a statement here.
“This unprecedented decline could also jeopardize the listing of the sites in question on the World Heritage list. States must reinforce their commitments to combat climate change and step up efforts to preserve these glaciers for future generations,” he added.
Researchers from AGU and ICUN combined data from a global glacier inventory, a review of existing literature and computer modeling to analyze the current state of the glaciers. They also looked at how the glaciers have evolved and analyzed how the glaciers will tolerate a warming climate in the coming decades.
Even if emissions are significantly reduced, the researchers concluded that eight of the 46 World Heritage sites will become ice-free by 2100.
In fact, earth’s glaciers have already lost nine trillion metric tons of ice in the 55 years between 1961 and 2016. An international team of scientists used satellite and direct field observations to conclude that Earth’s glaciers have melted such a profound sum of ice in the last half-century. The report was published in the journal Nature.
The study which has appeared in ‘Earth’s Future’, total ice volume in 2017 at all World Heritage sites is expected to drop between 33 to 60 percent by 2100, dependent upon the “emission scenario.”
The World Heritage sites expected to be impacted in North America include Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, in Alberta, Canada; seven parks that make up the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada; and Olympic National Park, in the state of Washington. All of these sites can expect to lose more than 70 percent of their current glacier ice by 2100, even if carbon emissions are “drastically lowered.”
“To preserve these iconic glaciers found in World Heritage sites, we urgently need to see significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. This is the only way of avoiding long-lasting and irreversible glacier decline and the related major natural, social, economic and migratory cascading consequences,” lead author Jean-Baptiste Bosson, scientific advisor for the IUCN’s World Heritage program, said in the statement.
“The study on glacier decline further emphasizes the need for individual and collective actions to achieve the mitigation and adaptation aspirations of the Paris Agreement on climate change,” he added.
Climate change has prompted the World Heritage organization to double the number of sites threatened by climate change since 2014.
We find that 19,039 glaciers have their whole or partial area within natural World Heritage sites. This corresponds to 9 per cent of all glaciers on earth. Between one and several thousand glaciers, whose sizes range from 0.01 to 106 km2, have been inventoried in 46 sites.