A UN-backed report warns that even a short rise above 1.5C of global warming would do lasting harm to the world's ice, the Guardian, Swissinfo and the Hindustan Times report.

The International Cryosphere Climate Initiative and the UN Environment Programme released the work on Monday. The cryosphere is all of Earth's snow and ice, including glaciers, sea ice and frozen ground. The reports come a week before the COP31 climate talks in Turkey.

Going past 1.5C, the stricter goal of the Paris climate deal, would lead to "significant, and often irreversible" changes, one report says, according to Swissinfo. Much of the damage would stay even if temperatures came back down.

The ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are melting about six times faster than in the 1990s, the Guardian reports. They would keep losing ice even if the overshoot were brief. The scientists say a safe long-term limit for the ice sheets is close to 1C, or lower.

Current policies point to about 2.8C of warming, the Guardian reports. That would leave less than 10% of glacier ice in the Rockies, the Alps, Iceland and Scandinavia. More than half the world's glaciers by number could vanish even at 1.5C, the Hindustan Times reports.

"Snow and ice respond rapidly to every fraction of a degree of warming," said James Kirkham, a glaciologist and lead author. Most of these systems "will take centuries or millennia to recover," he said.

The reports call for steep cuts in emissions and for removing carbon from the air. They point to a deadly glacier collapse in Nepal in August as a warning.

What we know: The scientists say overshoot must be kept as short as possible.
What we don't: How leaders at COP31 will respond.