Major glaciers, including Dolomites and Yosemite, to disappear by 2050 - U.N. report

Visitors near Glacier Point wait for the sun to rise in Yosemite National Park, California, U.S. July 2, 2021. REUTERS/Tracy Barbutes

Some of the world's most famous glaciers, including in the Dolomites in Italy, the Yosemite and Yellowstone parks in the United States and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania are set to disappear by 2050 due to global warming, whatever the temperature rise scenario, according to a UNESCO report.

The United Nations cultural agency UNESCO monitors some 18,600 glaciers across 50 of its World Heritage sites and said that glaciers in one third of World Heritage sites will disappear by 2050 regardless of the applied climate scenario

While the rest can be saved by keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) relative to pre-industrial levels, in a business-as-usual emissions scenario, about 50% of these World Heritage glaciers could almost entirely disappear by 2100.

FILE PHOTO:Glaciologist Matthias Huss together with members of the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) Romain Hugonnet and Andreas Linsbauer climb the Gries glacier during a trip to check measuring equipment in Gries, Switzerland, September 2, 2022. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/

"This report is a call to action. Only a rapid reduction in our CO2 emissions levels can save glaciers and the exceptional biodiversity that depends on them," Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s Director-General, said in a statement.

She added that the U.N.'s COP27 cimate conference will have a crucial role to help find solutions to this issue.

World Heritage glaciers as defined by UNESCO represent about 10 percent of the world's glacier areas and include some of the world's best-known glaciers, whose loss is highly visible as they are focal points for global tourism.

FILE PHOTO: A view shows a lake at the bottom of the Rhone Glacier in Obergoms, Switzerland, September 1, 2022. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/

The report's lead author Tales Carvalho told Reuters that World Heritage glaciers lose on average some 58 billion tons of ice every year – equivalent to the total annual volume of water used in France and Spain together – and contribute to almost 5% of global observed sea-level rise. 

UNESCO recommends that given the inevitable further shrinking of many of these glaciers in the near future, local authorities should make glaciers a focus of policy, by improving monitoring and research and by implementing disaster risk reduction measures.

"As glacier lakes fill up, they can burst and can cause catastrophic floods downstream," Carvalho said.

FILE PHOTO: Hikers walk past the newly uncovered Zanfeluron path, as a split of the Sex-Rouge and the Zanfleuron Glacier revealed the path for the first time in 2000 years due to this summer heatwave, at Glacier 3000 in Les Diablerets, Switzerland, September 11, 2022. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/

(Reporting by Manuel Ausloos; Writing by Geert De Clercq, Editing by William Maclean and Frank Jack Daniel)