A study just released by the World Meteorological Organization and other agencies highlights the threats to Africa’s rare snowy regions atop mountains due to climate change. According the Associated Press,

The new report seizes on the shrinking glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda as symbols of the rapid and widespread changes to come. “Their current retreat rates are higher than the global average. If this continues, it will lead to total deglaciation by the 2040s,” it says.

We’ve assembled a gallery of images just to show what the world would miss if we lost any of those snowcapped regions.

IMAGE CREDITS: Sergey Pesterev, Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Vakantie43, Chris 73, Phase9, Lafleursauvage. (Creative Commons License: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 only as published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.)