High Mountain Summit seeks to boost climate and disaster resilience

The world’s highest peaks, ranging from the Andes to the Alps and the Third Pole to the tropics, are being hit hard by climate change, and the impacts of this are cascading down to some of Earth’s most densely populated areas. The rapidly melting mountain glaciers serve as a source of freshwater for major rivers. Those rivers are vital for humans, ecosystems, agriculture, industry and serve as a means of transportation.

Weather forecasts, climate and water management services are often inadequate, and hazards such as glacial outflows and landslides regularly destroy lives and livelihoods.

The World Meteorological Organization and a wide array of partners are therefore convening a High Mountain Summit on 29–31 October. It will bring together more than 150 stakeholders from all over the globe to identify priority actions to support more sustainable development, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation both in high-mountain areas and downstream. This includes a roadmap to improve hydrometeorological services to address water and hazard impacts and management.

Mountain regions cover about a quarter of the Earth’s land surface and are home to around 1.1 billion people. They are often known as the “water towers of the world” because river basins with headwaters in the mountains supply freshwater to over half of humanity, including in the mountainous Himalaya-Hindu Kush and Tibetan Plateau region, known as the Third Pole.

The High Mountain Summit follows shortly after the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, which includes a dedicated chapter on high mountain areas.

Original source: WMO
Published on 28 October 2019