Global emissions of methane, a powerful planet-heating gas, are “rising rapidly” at the fastest rate in decades, requiring immediate action to help avert a dangerous escalation in the climate crisis, a new study has warned.
Methane emissions are responsible for half of the global heating already experienced, have been climbing significantly since around 2006 and will continue to grow throughout the rest of the 2020s unless new steps are taken to curb this pollution, concludes the new paper. The research is authored by more than a dozen scientists from around the world and published on Tuesday.
While the world “quite rightly” has focused on carbon dioxide as the primary driver of rising global temperatures, states the paper published in Frontiers in Science, little has been done to address methane, despite it having 80 times the warming power of CO2 in the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere.
“The growth rate of methane is accelerating, which is worrisome,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and lead author of the study. “It was quite flat until around 20 years ago and just in the last few years we’ve had this huge dump of methane. It’s made the job of tackling anthropogenic warming all the more challenging.”
So far in the 2020s, global methane emissions have typically been about 30m tons higher each year than during last decade, with annual records in methane emissions broken in 2021 and again in 2022. While there is no single clear reason for this, scientists point to a number of factors.
Methane comes from the drilling and processing of oil, gas and coal, with a boom in fracking causing a rash of new gas projects this century. The gas is also emitted from livestock, primarily through the burps of cows, and increased animal agriculture, as well as to a lesser degree expanding rice production, has contributed.
Meanwhile, rising global heat is causing the faster decomposition of organic matter in wetlands, thereby releasing more methane.
In 2021, the US and the European Union spearheaded a new initiative, called the Global Methane Pledge, which commits to a collective 30% cut in methane emissions by 2030. This scheme has now expanded to 155 countries yet only 13% of emissions are covered by current policies and only 2% of global climate finance goes towards cutting methane emissions, according to the new paper.
“I don’t think that target is necessarily out of reach yet but we have to redouble our efforts to get there,” said Shindell. “Countries are leading with oil and gas regulations, but it’s a challenge to get rules in place, and when it comes to livestock that’s just unpalatable to most governments, they just don’t want to touch it.”
But while CO2 can linger in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years, unless removed, methane is a far shorter-lived threat. If all methane emissions were cut immediately, 90% of accumulated methane would have left the atmosphere within 30 years, providing a swifter way to reduce global heating than focusing just on carbon dioxide.
“Methane is the strongest lever we can quickly pull to reduce warming between now and 2050,” said Shindell. “There’s just such a rapid response to cutting it. We’ve already seen the planet warm so much that if we are to avoid worse impacts we have to reduce methane. Reducing CO2 will protect our grandchildren – reducing methane will protect us now.”
The new paper outlines a number of actions countries should take, including better linking CO2 and methane reduction efforts and identifying the most effective methane cutting projects under certain circumstances.
Last week, the White House held a summit on cutting “super-pollutants” that include methane. The summit outlined measures such as improved monitoring, including the placement of methane sensors on commercial United Airlines aircraft, and a mixture of philanthropic and regulatory programs aimed at getting emissions down.
“It’s been somewhat ignored until now but methane really is at the point of the spear in climate protection,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House.
“If we want to limit near-term temperature rises, we need to get methane under control.”
