The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment & Health (UNU-INWEH) is proud to be a founding partner, along with the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan and many others in the 2025 UN International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation initiative in Canada.
As the only in-country UN entity working to advance water and water-related climate change policy, this is an unprecedented opportunity for us at UNU-INWEH – also known as the UN Think Tank on Water. Finding the words to meaningfully and unforgettably describe our current planetary situation as it is reflected in the rapidly accelerating loss of our glacial ice, is one of our greatest and most pressing challenges. But we cannot achieve this goal without a great deal of help.
With the support of the Outlook, we are proud to announce that Canmore will be a Canadian centre of activity in support of this important UN Year.
Now that we are feeling the heat, we need to see the light. In this coming year, we will celebrate Canadian researchers and institutions studying snow and ice and honour writers, poets, artists and photographers working to help us understand what the loss of glacier ice means. We will also profile the knowledge and understanding of the land offered by Indigenous peoples and the intimate perspectives of mountain guides and backcountry dwellers who spend their lives on and near the ice. We also want to reach out intergenerationally to youth.
In the epic inter-generational story, we at UNU, in tandem with our many partners, want at the close of this year to be able to tell the world that we as Canadians listened for an entire year to what the disappearing ice was trying to tell us. But also that we have began to imagine ourselves as actors in a heroic narrative, in which all of humanity saw what the planet’s glaciers were trying to warn us of and responded in time to avoid that peril.
Because we listened, we realized that what we are facing demands that we come to understand and rely on each other on a level and a scale of shared consciousness that has never occurred before. And we did it.
The official public launch of the United Nations International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation in Canada will be held on Jan. 25 at The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. The launch will be held in association with the opening of Meltdown: A Drop in Time an exhibition featuring amazing photographs taken of glacier ice by award-winning cinematographer Roger Vernon and renowned alpinist Jim Elzinga, founder of Guardians of the Ice. The exhibition also features a film by Leanne Allison and sculptural work by Tiffany Shaw.
Suggested citation: "COMMENTARY: Why glaciers matter," United Nations University, UNU-INWEH, 2025-01-24, https://unu.edu/inweh/article/commentary-why-glaciers-matter.
