Melting glaciers from mountainous communities to small island states can have profound impacts around the world. On Friday, March 21, UN General Assembly President Philémon Yang ended the first World Glacier Day lawsuit at the UN headquarters in New York, warning: “We can’t afford to wait, we have to act before the ice disappears… before our glaciers disappear.”
The event was held in the Trusteeship Committee Chamber, a space used from the 1940s to the 1990s to oversee the decolonization of territories under the United Nations Authority, as the Chamber has long been associated with international cooperation.
The lawsuit begins with “high-level opening,” a term used by the diplomatic community to indicate issues introduced by the state or senior ministers. In this case, the spokesperson was Tajikistan’s Foreign Minister Sirojiddin Muhriddin, who worked closely with the United Nations for nearly two decades. His appearance underscores Tajikistan’s strong commitment to working with the United Nations, especially as a country that relies on glacier water supply to ensure its future preservation.
“[For Tajikistan] Preserving glaciers…is a socio-economic necessity. Flood outbreaks threaten bridges and roads, and more frequent droughts affect agriculture, energy production and industrial activities.
Following an open statement, leading glacier experts and climate experts highlight specific information about glacier preservation. Shawn Marshall, a scientific adviser to the Canadian government, expressed concern about the acceleration of glacier melting: “In the glacier community, most of us are surprised by the development of this situation. One contributing factor he highlighted is the darkening of the glacier. He explained that the deposition of wildfire debris reduced the glacier’s ability to reflect sunlight, resulting in faster melting.
Ben Orlove, a senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate Institute, and a professor at the Columbia International Public Affairs Institute (SIPA) highlights the value of integrating indigenous knowledge with scientific knowledge. “Scientific knowledge is rich in scale and global, but this is usually a shallow time frame,” he said. He added that indigenous knowledge is characterized by “continuous monitoring of landscapes” and “focus on interacting with water, vegetation, soil.” Orlove also discusses the complementarity of scientific and indigenous knowledge systems based on community projects in Peru and Nepal.
Angela Hawse, a mountaineering guide and environmental advocate, focuses on grassroots mobilization to drive climate action. She highlighted the work of protecting our winter, a organization dedicated to attracting outdoor enthusiasts and interest groups to lobby for policy change. Hoth stressed the importance of effective communication strategies, such as highlighting the “gravity of the situation and the potential loss of things we love outdoors” in order to lobby specific goals such as public land conservation and legislation that will drive clean energy forward and address climate impacts.
Following the panel of experts, representatives of UN member states issued a formal statement outlining their national positions on glacier conservation. The representative of Barbados began by acknowledging that despite the absence of glaciers, snow or ice on tropical Barbados, “what happens in the glaciers is linked to the coastlines of small island developing countries like Barbados.” Pakistan mentioned its event at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 2024, titled “Glacier Transfer: Unveiling Pakistan’s Unique Climate Challenge.” The focus of the incident is the Karakran anomaly, an unusual phenomenon in which glaciers in the region maintain a stable mass due to locally lower temperatures. The representative believed that this further strengthened the need to limit temperature rise.
Other participants included Wesleyan University geoscientist Suzanne O’Connell, who recently introduced the insurance industry representatives to a growing report on the risk of flooding from glacial lakes. There are also various NGOs, such as project pressure, which mapped three disappearing glaciers in Uganda. Their presence suggests that the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Educational and Science Organization (UNESCO) are the main organizers of the event, extending glacier advocacy beyond the scope of the United Nations
In the conference room, there is a copy of the United Nations Water Development Report 2025 theme “Mountains and Glaciers: Water Towers”. The report was published by UNESCO representative UN-Water and was published publicly along with World Glacier Day. A key finding is that 60% of the world’s freshwater supply originates from “an increasingly fragile mountain environment”, which emphasizes the link between glaciers and freshwater.
After a brief pause, World Glacier Day activities transitioned to discussions on sustainable water management in World Water Day. March 22 has been World Water Day since 1993, introducing a different theme every year. This year’s theme is glacier preservation.
According to the World Water Day panelists, a major challenge is how to manage international cooperation in a changing global order. Kaveh Madani, director of the Institute for Water, Environment and Health at the UN University, believes: “The main problem we are dealing with is the uncertainty of the new world order.” This raises challenges such as “water governance”, especially given the loss of glaciers, “the largest freshwater reservoir in the world”.
Russia’s representative insisted: “The water agenda…must be viewed through the development lens [and] Not connected[ed] Solve peace and security issues. “At the same time, given that climate adaptation and water management are transnational issues, the UN Water Development Report emphasizes the need for “multilateralism”.
Daniel Naujoks, director of SIPA’s international organization and the United Nations research major, said that through the United Nations, “some small countries weigh more than they weigh.” Since the 1990s, small island countries have urged the world to recognize sea levels as a crucial issue. Naujoks cited the leadership of Kiribati, a Pacific island nation, using climate governance as an example. Similarly, Tajikistan is a small mountainous region that has achieved similar achievements since steadily promoting World Glacier Day. Indeed, the speakers of the day focused on the interconnectedness of our world and its climate change as the melting ice that affected the mountainous countries went all the way to the ocean, causing sea levels rise felt by Kiribati and the Barbados countries.
