Research by Professor Chris Stokes in our Department of Geography forms part of a new international report on the effect of climate on the world’s ice sheets.
The State of the Cryosphere Report is being presented at the COP 30 UN Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil.
It warns that current climate commitments are leading to over 2°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, affecting billions of people due to global ice loss and rising seas.
The report says that making sea level rise manageable requires a long-term temperature goal at or below 1°C of warming above pre-industrial levels.
Staying at current levels of warming of 1.2°C will likely lead to several metres of sea level rise over the coming centuries, exceeding coastal adaptation limits, the report adds.
Earlier this year, research by led by Professor Stokes, found that efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C under the Paris Climate Agreement may not go far enough to save the world’s ice sheets.
That study suggested the target should instead be closer to 1°C to avoid significant losses from the polar ice sheets and prevent a further acceleration in sea level rise.
Warming to 1.5°C would likely generate several metres of sea level rise over the coming centuries as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt in response to both warming air and ocean temperatures.
This would make it very difficult and far more expensive to adapt to rising sea levels.
In turn this would cause extensive loss and damage to coastal and island populations and lead to widespread displacement of hundreds of millions of people.
Professor Stokes will engage with policymakers and governments at COP 30 on the need for more awareness about the effects of exceeding the 1.5°C rise in temperatures could have on ice sheets and sea levels.
He is one of 50 leading scientists from around the world who contributed to the State of the Cryosphere Report, coordinated by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative.
His work has also been cited in a new Climate Analytics study which details how we can still get back to 1.5°C and below after briefly surpassing that target, which is now widely expected.
That report recommends a rapid “phase out” of fossil fuels and scale-up of carbon dioxide removal, underpinned by the technological revolution in renewable energy and electrification.
The polar ice sheets are also viewed as one of a number of key ‘tipping points’ in the Earth’s system and Professor Stokes’ work features in a new Global Tipping Points report that presents the multiple dangers of exceeding 1.5 °C.
The tipping points report also looks at the critical need to minimise the magnitude and duration of global temperature ‘overshoot’ through rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Read the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative’s State of the Cryosphere Report 2025.
Professor Chris Stokes led on the research paper “Warming of +1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets” published earlier this year in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.
Read the Climate Analytics report on rescuing 1.5°C and the Global Tipping Points report.
Our Department of Geography is ranked first in the UK in The Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide 2026, second in the Complete University Guide 2026, and 11th globally in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.Visit our Geography webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
Main image: Snow blowing across the terminus of Vanderford Glacier, Wilkes Land, East Antarctica (photograph: Richard Jones).
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