High Commissioner Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri invites attention towards climate issue

Canberra: Pakistani High Commissioner to Australia Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri invited attention towards the climate issue.

“Glacial melting poses a grave environmental threat. Pakistan is particularly concerned, as it holds more glacial ice than any country outside the polar regions,” the envoy posted on X.

More than three-quarters of the world’s glaciers are set to vanish if climate change continues unchecked, a major new study warned Thursday, fuelling sea-level rise and jeopardizing water supplies for billions.

Published in Science, the international analysis provides the clearest picture yet of long-term glacier loss, revealing that every fraction of a degree in global temperature rise significantly worsens the outlook.

It may sound grim, but co-lead author Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and ETH Zurich, said the findings should be seen as a “message of hope.”

Under existing climate policies, global temperatures are projected to reach 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9F) above pre-industrial levels by 2100—a pathway that would ultimately erase 76% of current glacier mass over the coming centuries.

But if warming is held to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target, 54% of glacial mass could be preserved, according to the study, which combined outputs from eight glacier models to simulate ice loss across a range of future climate scenarios.

“What is really special about this study is we can really show how every tenth of a degree of additional warming matters,” co-lead author Lilian Schuster of the University of Innsbruck said.