The Alps are heading towards the loss of a record number of glaciers in the coming decades. If global temperature increase is restricted to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as stipulated by the Paris Climate Agreement, approximately 430 of the 3,000 glaciers presently located in Italy and throughout the Alpine region are projected to persist by the year 2100, representing approximately 12%. The percentage would drop further with higher temperature increases: with +2.7 degrees, only 3% would remain, about 110 glaciers, while with +4 degrees only 1% would still survive by the end of the century, around twenty in total. These are the projections presented in a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, conducted by Lander Van Tricht of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), which has, for the first time, quantified the number of glaciers disappearing. Globally, a 1.5-degree increase would result in approximately 100,000 glaciers remaining by the end of the century, whereas a 4-degree increase would leave only 18,000, roughly one-tenth. The authors of the study also sought to determine the "peak glacier extinction", the moment at which the rate of glacier disappearance in a single year attains its highest level. In the optimal scenario of a 1.5-degree temperature increase, the peak would be reached approximately in 2041, during which time 2,000 glaciers are projected to disappear within a single year.