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Day 1: State of the Planet • Theme: Governing Across Scales

Ice Sheets and Glaciers in a Warming World

Mike Sparrow, Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), UK; Volker Rachold, International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), Germany; Rasul Ghulam, Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD), Pakistan

Session content:
Observations clearly show that glaciers and Polar ice-sheets are responding to climate change. Though considerable uncertainty remains regarding the response of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to future warming, recent research has shown that ice loss from Greenland and the Antarctic has increased over the last 20 years, and will soon become the biggest driver of sea level rise. Many glaciers at the “Third Pole” - the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau (HKH - Himalaya-Karakoran-Hindukush) - are also losing their ice mass at unprecedented rates, resulting in changes in water availability for populations and agriculture downstream.

This session discusses new findings on the changes of Polar ice sheets and glaciers, including those of the Asian mountains, in response to climate change. The results of both field studies and modelling will be presented. The focus will be on the impact of these changes on both global scale, in terms of sea level rise, and on regional scale, e.g. water resources.