00:00Good afternoon everybody, thank you very much indeed for attending this.
00:04It exposes an additional two to three hundred thousand people to annual flooding.
00:10...glacier loss from year to year. If you sum up all the loss of ice that we had, you can show...
00:19Now 2024, we lost 450 gigatons from all the glaciers together. It was not the most extreme
00:27year, but it was ranked number four of the years with most glacier mass loss.
00:34And if you look at the past years, we actually had like the five most negative years on record
00:40we did have in the past six years. So you see this increasing dramatic glacier loss from year to year.
00:58We had an increasing loss by glacier ice year by year by year,
01:04accumulating in this incredible number of about 9,000 gigatons of ice lost since 1975.
01:12Now this is just a huge number and hard to imagine. So again, if you take the example of Germany,
01:20it would be an ice block of the size of Germany with a thickness of 25 meters.
01:26That is the ice that we lost since 1975 from glaciers.
01:32It was not the most extreme year, but it was ranked number four.
01:37And so accumulated again, this is about 25 millimeters of sea level rise, or currently
01:43a bit more than one millimeter each year. Now you might say one millimeter is not exactly a lot,
01:49doesn't sound much, right? But it's a small number with a big impact. Each additional
01:55millimeter of sea level rise exposes an additional two to 300,000 people to annual flooding.
02:18So that's bad news. Glaciers might disappear on the current
02:21melting rates within this century. But there's a second bad news. Even if these glaciers are gone,
02:28the glacier melt continues in the polar regions, will kick in and so will continue to melt and
02:35further increase sea levels together with the ice sheets in the next centuries.
02:51So
03:14really every tenth of a degree of warming that we can avoid
03:19will prevent us from 2.5 millimeter of sea level rise from glaciers alone. And again,
03:27which prevents about 500,000 of people from exposure to annual flooding.
03:34Just introduce yourself by affiliation.
03:39But globally we can say we have some 275,000 glaciers left, disappearing quickly. And in total
03:46the glaciers together with the ice masses on the ice shelves of Greenland as well as Antarctica,
03:51it's about 70 percent of all the fresh water is stored in the ice mass. Important to know is that
03:58WMO only last month declared 2024 as the warmest year on record, after a number of record-breaking
04:06months with highest temperatures. And we can negotiate many things, and here at the UN we
04:11love to negotiate many things, but we cannot negotiate physical laws. And one is the melting
04:15point of ice. This is unnegotiable, and then an increasing warming climate is
04:22contributing to more ice as well as snow melt.
04:33It's putting at risk the water supplies, it's putting at risk food security, energy security,
04:39as well as the ecosystem services that water resources and other resources provide.
04:44But you shouldn't also forget the social, the cultural, as well as the
04:48spiritual values glaciers have.
04:52But you shouldn't also forget the social, the cultural, as well as the spiritual values glaciers have.
05:22Preserving glaciers is not only an environmental imperative, it's really a survival strategy.
05:40We need to advance our scientific knowledge, we need to advance us through better observing
05:43systems, through better forecasts and better early warning systems for the planet and the
05:48people.
05:50Only then we can protect our water supplies, the livelihoods of people as well as ecosystems
05:56for future generations.
06:20For more UN videos visit www.un.org
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