One Planet Polar Summit: the first international summit on the protection of glaciers and poles

1/ Context

Polar regions, which are particularly vulnerable to phenomena like climate change and biodiversity erosion, are being increasingly exposed to environmental threats due notably to tourism and risks of over-exploitation.

In 2022, France adopted its National Polar Strategy for 2030, which sounded the alarm about the fragility of glacial and polar worlds and proposes concrete responses at the level of the international community. Among other elements, this strategy set a goal for France to be the “champions of the protection of Antarctica”. In this context, the French President has decided to host a first-of-its-kind Summit on glaciers and poles, in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

2/ What happened? 

This Summit, which took place on November 8 and November 9, 2023, was hosted in the context of the Paris Peace Forum, which was itself held from November 10 to November 11, 2023.

The goal was to bring together the international community in order to elaborate a long-term strategy for the protection and adaptation of glacial and polar biodiversity and populations. A great variety of actors were convened, including scientific researchers, experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), non-governmental organisations and representatives of indigenous peoples.

3/ Outcome

This Summit led to the adoption of the Paris Call for Glaciers and Poles, to which is annexed a scientific statement on cryosphere. This declaration underlines how “the years 2021 and 2022 saw massive ice loss in mountain glaciers, with ice loss rates 20% higher on average than the previous decade”.  The countries and international organizations that endorsed the Call wish to sound the “alarm about the scale and the speed of the melting ice and thawing permafrost and the risk of crossing thresholds and tipping points, which have increased with the continued rise in global greenhouse emissions”. 

Moreover, the last part of this declaration is a call for action. Among many other proposals, countries and organizations are for example “calling for more in-depth scientific research on the cryosphere without delay, better integration of the effects of cryosphere changes into economic decision-making and increased education on the issues relating to this” and calling “for the international efforts underway to be scaled up”.