Glaciers play an important role for agriculture in the semi-arid areas of Central Asia given the fact that river flow is considerably supplied by glacier- and snowmelt in summer when water demand for irrigation is at its peak. The scientific material for the present contribution stems from an article recently accepted by the international journal‚ 'Climatic Change’ with the title: 'Tracing Glacier Wastage in the Northern Tien Shan (Kyrgyzstan/Central Asia) over the Last 40 Years’ written by Peter Niederer, Viktor Bilenko, Natasha Ershova, Hans Hurni, Sergeji Yerokhin, and Daniel Maselli. The investigations made in a representative watershed of the Northern Tien Shan mountain range in Kyrgyzstan (see Figure 1) for the period 1963-2000 show a clear trend in glacier retreat. During this short time period glaciers lost 28% of their area with an apparent acceleration of wastage since the 1980s. The most affected glaciers are those smaller than half a square kilometre; while they decreased by only 9.1% from 1963 to 1986, they lost 41.5% of their surface between 1986 and 2000.
