KYOTO: The world's glaciers could melt within a century if global warming accelerates, leaving billions of people short of water and some islanders without a home, environmentalists said yesterday.
"Unless governments take urgent action to prevent global warming, billions of people worldwide may face severe water shortages as a result of the alarming melting rate of glaciers," the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said in a report.
It said human impact on climate was melting glaciers from the Andes to the Himalayas, bringing longer-term threats of higher sea levels that could swamp island states.
Officials from 180 nations will meet in Milan from December 1st-12th to discuss international efforts to rein in the rise in global temperatures, blamed by scientists on emissions of gases from factories and cars.
"Simulations project that a 4C rise in temperature would eliminate nearly all of the world's glaciers" by the end of the century, the WWF said.
Himalayan glaciers feed seven great rivers of Asia that run through China and India, the world's most populous nations, ensuring a year-round water supply to two billion people.
The WWF said that nations most at risk also included Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, where melt water from Andean glaciers supplies millions of people during dry seasons.
Island states like Tuvalu in the Pacific, meanwhile, could be submerged by rising sea levels triggered by melting glaciers.
Sea levels could rise even further if two of the world's largest ice caps, in Antarctica and Greenland, melt substantially, though the report left them out of its reckoning because of their unpredictability.
Glaciers are ancient rivers of packed snow that creep through the landscape.
"Glaciers are extremely important because they respond rapidly to climate change, and their loss directly affects human populations and ecosystems," said Ms Jennifer Morgan, head of the WWF's climate change programme.
"The trends and the experience are quite alarming," she said. "Countries have to speed up their action on global warming."
The WWF urged Russia to ratify the UN's 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is a tiny first step towards reining in greenhouse gases and curbing rising temperatures.
Kyoto will collapse without Russia's backing after the US pulled out in 2001.