State of the Cryosphere Report 2026 – The Cost of Overshoot

Overshooting the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target will bring large-scale, and in many cases irreversible, impacts from the Earth’s melting ice sheets, permafrost, glaciers, sea ice and polar oceans. This will bring a catalogue of dangerous global risks. Many are already visible today, including the devastating floods on the Nepal-China border in August that killed thousands, accelerating sea-level rise that threatens hundreds of millions of people globally and potentially irreversible disruption to the planet’s oceans and weather systems.

The State of the Cryosphere 2026: The Cost of Overshoot report was released jointly alongside the UNEP/ICCI report Overshoot and the Cryosphere: Averting Global Meltdown on November 2, 2026. The two reports set out the global impacts of ice loss with overshoot, exploring which ones are locked in, and how urgent action – especially the transition from fossil fuels – can still stop or slow the worst of this damage. Overshoot must be kept to the absolute minimum and temperatures returned to below 1.5°C as quickly as possible.

Current levels of warming are already unsafe for the Arctic, the Antarctic, mountain glaciers and the polar oceans. State of the Cryosphere 2026 describes new science and observations from the past year, such as Switzerland’s loss of 20% of its glacier ice in the past five years. Other impacts range from accelerating sea-level rise due to rapid ice loss, to increasing water shortages and mountain hazards as glaciers disappear and snow drought conditions spread.

Although returning to 1.5°C will slow ice loss, a truly ‘safe’ temperature target for Earth’s ice is now thought to be closer to 1.0°C or even below over the coming centuries.

“For decades now, cryosphere scientists have been sounding the alarm: ice matters, and for each rise in CO2, the global impacts from its loss will grow all more devastating. It is high time we listen, and act accordingly.”
  – Excerpt from the Forward by Christiana Figueres, Former UNFCCC Executive Secretary and Founding Partner of Global Optimis

Reviewed and supported by over 50 leading cryosphere scientists, this is the latest report in the State of the Cryosphere series, which takes the pulse of the cryosphere on an annual basis. The cryosphere is the name given to Earth’s snow and ice regions and ranges from ice sheets, glaciers, snow and permafrost to sea ice and the polar oceans – which are acidifying far more rapidly than warmer waters. The report describes how a combination of melting polar ice sheets, vanishing glaciers, and thawing permafrost will have rapid, irreversible, and disastrous impacts worldwide.

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