Save Our Glaciers: Plan Now for Action on World Water Day on March 22
Join thousands of activists worldwide for World Water Day on March 22! This year’s World Water Day theme is “Glacier Preservation.”
Glaciers are critical to life. Their meltwater is essential for drinking water, irrigation for agriculture, freshwater fisheries, industry, clean energy production, and healthy ecosystems. As glaciers melt, cities that depend on them for drinking water and food experience increased stress.
What does “glacier preservation” really mean? How do we “preserve” glaciers? Each of us must take responsibility for our activities and carbon footprint–where we live, work, and recreate. We are all interconnected and contribute to catastrophic global warming and climate catastrophes from the local to the global.
Key Talking Points for World Water Day 2025:
- Glaciers are melting more quickly than ever. As the planet gets hotter due to climate change, our frozen world shrinks. Melting Arctic and Antarctic ice causes oceans to warm and seas to rise. The water cycle is more unpredictable and extreme, especially for the millions of people in the high Andes cities of Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia.
- Glacial retreat causes devastation. Meltwater flows cause floods, droughts, landslides, sea level rise, and damage to ecosystems.
- Glacier preservation is a survival strategy. The Himalayan Mountain glaciers are the headwaters of the rivers of India, South Asia, and China–the Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers. These rivers supply billions of people with drinking water, irrigation, and “green” hydropower. We must reduce greenhouse gas emissions and manage meltwater more sustainably for people and the planet.
Image by the United Nations.
Ways to Engage in World Water Day 2025
- Plan Now. Your branch can join with local environment, climate, school, and ARTivist, dance, and theater groups to take action on World Water Day. Create a short play, dance, or song about the “Save our Glaciers” theme. Gather up used white sheets for a start!
- Table together or set up your own table nearby. Be sure to find out if you need to reserve space for tabling.
- You can find various helpful resources for World Water Day on the United Nations website. Copy the “Save the Glaciers” image at the top as an 8.5×11 or 11×17 poster to use. Invite local stores to put it in a front window, display it at your table, or use it in a march.
- Make signs and banners. Follow these directions to order the WILPF banners shown or print your own at a local print shop. Make the connection between war and environmental destruction, contamination of the land, and water issues.
Beyond World Water Day: Book Recommendations for the Climate Crisis
The Secure and the Dispossessed by Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes
Overview of the book from Pluto Press:
“While the world’s scientists and many of its inhabitants despair at the impact of climate change, corporate and military leaders see nothing but opportunities. For them, melting ice caps mean newly accessible fossil fuels, borders to be secured from ‘climate refugees’, social conflicts to be managed and more failed states in which to intervene. They are ‘securing’ their assets at the expanse [sic] of the planet and its inhabitants.
The Secure and the Dispossessed looks at these deadly approaches with a critical eye. It also considers the flip-side: that the legitimacy of the elite is under unprecedented pressure – from resistance by communities to resource grabs to those creating new ecological and socially just models for managing our energy, food and water.
Topics covered include geoengineering, militarism, refugee protection, greenwashing and the agricultural crisis among others. Adaptation and resilience to a climate-changed world is desperately needed, but the form it will take will affect all of our futures.”
H Is for HOPE: Climate Change from A to Z by Elizabeth Kolbert
From the overview of the book from Penguin Random House:
“Adapted from essays originally published in The New Yorker, H Is for Hope is simultaneously inspiring, alarming, and darkly humorous—a unique examination of our changing world.”
“Illustrated throughout with vivid pen-and-ink-style drawings by graphic artist Allsbrook, the book both informs and disturbs us about the climate uncertainties facing humankind, but never without offering glimmers of hope. Its accessibility, readability, and thoughtfulness will undoubtedly appeal to a wide audience. . . . An intelligently provocative and well-presented look at the world’s most pressing issue.”
–Kirkus Reviews
