The most visited glaciers in the world could soon disappear

The United Nations cultural agency warns that the Kilimanjaro, Dolomites, Yosemite and Yellowstone ice caps could disappear by 2050, highlighting the impact of travel on climate change.

Inscription on the World Heritage List of UNESCO, the United Nations educational, scientific and cultural organization, is something of a seal of approval in the tourism world. The list, which began in 1978, has more than 1,150 sites nominated by their host countries and includes tourist destinations like the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Central Amazon Conservation Complex in Brazil.

It is also home to some of the world's most famous and visited glaciers, including those in Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks. But according to a report published by the agency last week, a third of them are expected to disappear by 2050 due to climate change.

Glaciers likely to disappearing include the last remaining in Africa, in Kilimanjaro National Park and on Mount Kenya, those of Mont Perdu in the Pyrenees, which spans the borders of France and Spain, and in the Italian Dolomites. /p>

The report, released days before the start of the UN climate change conference COP27 in Egypt, posed a challenge to the travel industry, which contributes largely to global carbon emissions, with an estimated footprint of between 8 and 11 percent of total greenhouse gases, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, or W.T.T.C. Aviation accounts for around 17% of total travel carbon emissions.

The report is a stark reminder of the essential role the travel industry plays in preserving sensitive sites and reducing carbon emissions, said James Thornton, managing director of Intrepid Travel, a travel company specializing in sustainable travel and which organizes trips to many of the glaciers cited in the report.

"It's very much a wake-up call," he said. "The key message is that ultimately for the travel industry, there is no vaccine for climate change. We need to take urgent action to decarbonize quickly. Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park UNESCO warns the park's glaciers could be gone by 2050. Credit...Ric Tapia, via Associated Press

Fifty of the world heritage sites in UNESCO are home to glaciers, and 18,600 of the glaciers have been identified at these sites.A third of the glaciers at these sites are "doomed to disappear by 2050", according to the report.

"These are projections," said Tales Carvalho Resende, a researcher from Brazil and one of the report's authors. "We hope we are wrong, of course, but these are projections based on hard science."

Glaciers will disappear regardless of "climate scenarios", a- he declared. But the remaining two-thirds of glaciers at World Heritage sites could still be saved if global warming was limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the report says.

The glaciers on the list lose 58 billion tons of ice per year...