Nau mai, haere mai.

Climate change has brought with it a new lexicon, words and terms once heard more in laboratories or lecture halls, now mainstream and sometimes menacing: anthropogenic, emissions, mitigation, offsetting, net zero, sequestration, tipping point.

Add to these “cryosphere” – the planet’s polar ice sheets, ice shelves, sea ice, mountain glaciers and permafrost. Handily enough, it goes under C along with COP28, the “conference of the parties” signed up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, kicking off in Dubai this Thursday.

And the impending crisis in the cryosphere will certainly be on the agenda at COP28. As Timothy Naish explains today, recent major studies and reports have highlighted the fragility of Earth’s frozen regions due to global warming, and the already observable consequences for ecosystems and communities.

This year’s State of the Cryosphere report, for instance, which assessed the most recent science, warned that even 2°C of warming would trigger irreversible loss of ice sheets, glaciers, snow, sea ice and permafrost. Nothing is untouched by that level of change.

“The loss of two-thirds of the world’s high mountain glaciers (often referred to as the third pole) is also likely,” Naish writes by way of example. “This will affect two billion people who depend on these frozen water stores for their drinking, power production, agriculture and related ecosystems services.”

Of course it is never too late, but the speed and scale of action required to slow these trends seems beyond most governments, not just the one recently installed in Wellington. Whether or not COP28 marks any kind of political tipping point, an environmental one is surely getting closer every day.

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