Reducing air pollution could increase methane emissions from wetlands – here’s what needs to be done

Sampling in a Pantanal lake, Brazil. Vincent Gauci, CC BY-NC-ND

What if well-meaning policies that reduce one atmospheric pollutant could also increase natural emissions of powerful greenhouse gases?

Our findings, just published in the journal Science Advances, advance an earlier discovery of one such unfortunate interaction. This means that we need to work much harder than we thought to stay within the safe climate limits of the Paris agreement.