Report re-published in The Multiplural World, March 22, 2026 (with related reports further below)
Military conflicts such as the war in Iran are diverting global attention away from global warming and the ecological crisis, scientists warn. This report was first published in the South China Morning Post on March 21, 2026.
Accelerating glacial retreat in the Himalayas over the past decades is threatening over two billion people in the region who depend on meltwater from the “water tower of Asia” for their daily needs, according to climate scientists.
Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region have been losing ice at twice the rate since 2000, with smaller glaciers under 0.5 sq km shrinking more rapidly than larger ones, according to two landmark reports published on Saturday to coincide with the World Day for Glaciers. Researchers warn that such a pace of loss poses immediate risks of localised water shortage and intensifying climate-related hazards.
The Himalayas are the world’s highest mountain range, stretching some 2,400 km across five countries–India, Nepal, Bhutan, China and Pakistan. Formed by the ongoing collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates, the snow and ice covered range contains over 110 peaks exceeding 7,200m, including the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest.
The findings were released by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a Kathmandu-based inter-governmental organisation consisting of eight regional members, including India and China.
“This is the first time we have this field-observed data that is giving us a signal that the mass loss has increased,” said Mohd Farooq Azam, a cryosphere specialist at ICIMOD and one of the report’s authors. “We can now see that there is a trend, which allows us to identify which glaciers to monitor.”
The HKH region stretches 3,500km (2,174 miles) across eight countries, from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east. It is home to over 54,000 glaciers that feed 10 of Asia’s largest river systems – Yangtze, Ganges, Mekong and Irrawaddy, among others – sustaining food, water, energy and livelihoods for billions in the region and downstream communities.
Extreme heat impacts
Researchers from ICIMOD say about 78 per cent of the HKH region’s glacier area, located between 4,500 metres and 6,000 metres above sea level, is “highly exposed to elevation-dependent warming”. Glaciers in the HKH are expected to lose 30 per cent to 50 per cent of their volume if temperatures rise by 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, according to a 2023 ICIMOD assessment.
At the global level, 2024 was confirmed as the hottest year on record, with average temperature exceeding 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level, undermining the threshold set under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Researchers attribute this surge to increasing greenhouse gas emissions and “super pollutants”, such as black carbon, which raise temperatures and accelerate glacial melts.
Mohd Farooq Azam warns, “However, the HKH region is warming around twice the global temperature”, putting the region’s glaciers at greater risk.
Miriam Jackson, a glaciologist at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate with experience in the Himalayas, said even one tenth of a degree increase would have a significant effect on the cryosphere, referring to Earth’s ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice, snow, and permafrost. She notes that glacial retreats would reduce the flow of water from snowmelt into rivers, triggering cascading risks and threatening lives and livelihoods.
“Agriculture that is dependent on glacier meltwater will face greater and greater challenges. Hydro-electric power will be less efficient and create less electricity. These and other changes will lead to societal unrest,” she says. “We should be scared, because even if we are not directly affected in terms of our water supply or sea level rise, we will feel the knock-on effects in some ways.”
Jackson also warns of outburst floods from glacier lakes and rare glacial collapses becoming more frequent. In 2024, an outburst from the Thyanbo glacial lake in Nepal’s Everest region swept settlements, while a similar occurrence in the South Lhonak glacial lake a year earlier inundated the Teesta River, killing at least 77 people in India’s Sikkim state.
Gaps in data
Researchers of the new reports note that between 1990 and 2020, the HKH glaciers lost about 12 per cent of their total area and nine per cent of their estimated ice reserves. However, detailed assessments remain constrained by a dearth of adequate monitoring stations, with researchers describing “much of the region is a black box in terms of cryospheric risk assessments”.
The Tsho Rolpa is one of Nepal’s biggest and most dangerous glacial lakes that has been consistently expanding, raising risks of glacial lake outburst flooding (photo by Sudan Bikash Maharjan, ICIMOD)
While the HKH has over 54,000 glaciers, there are only 38 monitoring stations, and nearly half of them are no longer in service. Major glacierised Himalayan regions spanning India, Pakistan and Bhutan are insufficiently monitored, according to researchers.
Azam explains that all but two of the 38 functioning monitoring stations are in Nepal. Only seven of the 38 adhere to the World Glacier Monitoring Service’s benchmark standards of at least ten years of observations. “We need better coordination to plan strategically,” he says. “The findings in our report will help select more glaciers where we currently don’t have observations.”
Photographic records over the decades can help illustrate the impact of rising temperatures on glaciers, according to analysts. Images of the Yala Glacier in Nepal’s Langtang region have shown its dramatic transformation over time – it was declared a “dead glacier” last year after shrinking 66 per cent since the 1970s.
Analysts argue that governments must tackle the “urgent” problem swiftly, noting that glaciers serve as early warning indicators of accelerating climate change across mountain ecosystems.
Jackson cautions that ongoing global conflicts, including the Iran war, risk diverting attention from what she described as “the greatest problem of climate change [sic]”.
“As the war causes immense damage – fatalities, injuries and destruction – we are putting even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Troops are mobilised and huge aircraft carriers and planes move troops around. There will also be additional pollution that will affect glacier melt.”
Previously reported in The Multiplural World:
* Dead glaciers are a loss; dying ones are threats, interactive feature report in New York Times (with extensive photos), Nov 13, 2025 Melting ice from the Himalayas is creating thousands of unstable lakes, a growing menace to towns and cities below (Read the report here in pdf format: A dead glacier is a loss; a dying one is a threat)
* Trump regime wants end to gov’t support alternative energy sources to fossil fuels. Report in Politico, July 8, 2025 [Many alternative energy sources to fossil fuels are falsely labelled by green capitalism ideologues as being ‘renewable’. Examples include nuclear energy… but also hydro-electric energy. There will be less and less hydro-electricity in the world as glaciers melt, causing rivers to dry up, and as drought deepens in many regions of the Earth due to changes in weather patterns and water flow.]
* Asia is ground zero for the impact of the world’s glacier losses, essay by Dr. John Pomeroy, in The Multiplural World, March 22, 2025 (with related readings) Other mountain ranges in the world are losing their glaciers faster than in Asia, but the economy of Asia and the livelihoods of the people who live there place the continent on the front line of the global warming emergency
