The this year’s UN World Water Day on 22 March 2025 is under the theme of ‘Glacier Preservation’, a nice opportunity to recall that 2025 is also the UN year on glacier preservation and that this year, we celebrate the first World Glaciers Day on 21 March 2025. Glaciers play the role of ambassadors for climate change awareness, highlighting the urgent need for global action to protect these vital freshwater reserves for future generations. One of the first papers that attempted a large-scale assessment of the importance of glaciers for water availability was the work by Kaser et al., 2010, published in PNAS, computing seasonally delayed melt water inputs from global streamflow data, climatological precipitation and air temperature data and glacier inventories. Since then, much progress has been made in terms of large-scale glacio-hydrological modelling (e.g. Hanus et al., 2024, GMD), and the role of glaciers for groundwater recharge and for drought mitigation is intensely studied.
Terminus of the Morteratsch glacier, 29 July 2024
What we lose and what we earn
Besides direct implications of glacier retreat for water resources and related natural hazards (e.g. glacier outburst floods), we also lose successively the highly precious climate information enclosed in ice (ie. we lose glacier climate archives). And what we should not lose sight of in our hydrological world view is what is left behind if the glaciers melt: the proglacial margins that play an essential role for high elevation biodiversity and that unravel fascinating bio-geomorphological processes if we take a closer look. These areas are absolutely worth protecting from competing interests (e.g. hydropower production), which led to the creation of the Life and Ice initiative.
To conclude, I take the opportunity here to advertise the ongoing Birmingham World Water Day – Week by the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action (BISCA), ( coorganized by Stefan Krause, our last week HydroTalk guest), with a special focus also on Glacier Preservation, check out their website for the upcoming speakers of the online panel discussion.
