Mass loss of ice from the world’s 19 glacier regions was 450bn tonnes in 2024, says a new report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Glaciers are melting rapidly because of the climate crisis. From 2022-2024, the world saw the largest three-year loss of glaciers on record, said the report.

While the mass loss was relatively moderate in regions like the Canadian Arctic or Greenland, the glaciers in Scandinavia, Svalbard off Norway, and North Asia experienced their largest annual mass loss on record, said the report.

“Preservation of glaciers is a not just an environmental, economic and societal necessity. It’s a matter of survival,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. 

Many people get their drinking water from glacier melt. And many people are also at risk from flooding if there is excess melt. Approximately 275,000 glaciers cover about 700,000 square kilometres globally.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) estimates that glaciers – separate from the continental ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica – have lost a total of more than 9,000bn tonnes since records began in 1975.

“This is equivalent to a huge ice block of the size of Germany with a thickness of 25 metres,” said Prof. Dr. Michael Zemp, the director of the WGMS.

At present melt rates, many glaciers in Western Canada and the US, Scandinavia, Central Europe, the Caucasus, New Zealand and the Tropics will not survive the 21st century, it said.

This follows a data published in the journal Nature in early 2025 and coordinated by the WGMS.

The study – the Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE) – found that between 2000 and 2023, glaciers lost 5% of their remaining ice. Regionally, the loss ranges from 2% in the Antarctic and Subantarctic to almost 40% in Central Europe. 

From 2000 to 2023, the global glacier mass loss totalled 6,542bn tonnes – or 273bn tonnes of ice lost per year – according to the study. This amounts to the amount of water that the entire global population currently consumes in 30 years, assuming three litres per person per day.

During this period, glacier melt contributed 18mm to global sea-level rise. "This might not sound much, but it has a big impact: every millimetre sea-level rise exposes an additional 200,000 to 300,000 people to annual flooding,” said Zemp.

Glacier melt is currently the second largest contributor to sea-level rise.