Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Ambition on Melting Ice (AMI) on Sea-level Rise and Mountain Water Resources is a collaborative effort among twenty diverse countries, with ICCI as its secretariat. After several years of planning, AMI officially launched at COP27 in Egypt.Its goal is to increase urgency (how quickly emissions reductions must occur) alongside ambition (the scale of needed reductions) within global climate policymaking processes, and national social and economic pathways. Adequate action is needed immediately to protect not only mountain and Arctic peoples who live in the cryosphere, but the entire planet. What begins in the cryosphere, will not stay in the cryosphere.
By amplifying this message to decision-makers through key international forums (e.g., UNFCCC/UNGA/Davos), AMI is at the forefront of a diplomatic effort to return temperatures below 1.5¬∞C in 2100, and below 1¬∞C no later than 2200. This is an essential issue of global equity and intergenerational justice.

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How Project Affects Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions:

Replaces/avoids GHGs (e.g., projects that replace sources of GHGs, such as the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, transport, or other energy uses), Reduces GHGs (e.g., projects that reduce sources of GHGs, such as through efficiency or other changes in consumption), Removes/stores GHGs (e.g., projects that capture, sequester, or otherwise enhance the "sinks" that accumulate and store GHGs)

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Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

AMI empowers climate vulnerable communities at the highest level of global climate policymaking. This is especially the case for developing countries, where hundreds of millions of people live in low-lying coastal areas and billions more are dependent upon diminishing water resources from the mountain cryosphere. These communities are too often marginalized from climate action discourses dominated by voices from the Global North; but with AMI, vulnerable and historically marginalized communities are centered through founding membership of developing countries, as well as through collaborative action by all AMI members to make clear to decision-makers that cryosphere changes will have catastrophic consequences even for communities that are far from ice and snow, unless the world acts urgently and ambitiously.

As AMI Secretariat, ICCI also works to ensure gender balance and national/ethnic diversity in AMI‚ activities, and to center youth and Indigenous voices. Specific examples include ensuring engagement of Indigenous groups in planning and implementation of COP side events, as well as facilitating youth participation at the UNFCCC COP. At COP27, ICCI hosted a gender-balanced group of eight early career scientist volunteers, hailing from Nepal, Canada, the UK, China, France, and Chile; these committed young people played important roles in ensuring broad outreach to countries, media, and civil society, and in directly supporting the AMI launch. In 2023, ICCI also will be designating a Youth Empowerment Lead on its staff, who will support AMI‚ aim to highlight the urgency of preserving the cryosphere as an issue of intergenerational justice.

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Mission Statement:

ICCI is a global non-governmental organization registered in the US and in Sweden. It supports ambitious climate action at international forums worldwide. AMI similarly operates globally, bringing together not only polar and mountain nations ‚ the countries most commonly associated with the cryosphere (Earth‚ frozen regions) ‚ but also low-lying nations on the front lines of cryosphere changes due to sea-level rise from melting polar ice sheets. In addition to Co-Chairs Chile and Iceland, current AMI members include countries from High Mountain Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, Europe, Latin America and Pacific Island nations. Through public high-level events and materials for decision makers, AMI‚ work aims to make clear that protecting the cryosphere through vigorous climate action is a matter of urgent global concern, because the greatest impacts on human communities lie well outside these regions ‚ and the consequences of climate change-induced cryosphere melt will affect us all.