Methane Emissions: Researchers Recommend Rapid Reduction

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Cattle breeding in Brazil: Reducing methane emissions is crucial to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement

Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images

Speed ​​is of the essence in the fight against climate change - that much is certain.

But while the discussions about strategies for climate protection are primarily about reducing carbon dioxide, a far more potent greenhouse gas is often overlooked: methane.

It arises, for example, in cattle breeding and is released through the digestive process of cows or when fossil fuels are extracted.

And last year, emissions of this greenhouse gas had reached a new high.

The share of methane in global warming is far below that of carbon dioxide.

But a study has now come to the conclusion that the reduction of methane emissions could help decisively to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement of limiting global warming to well below two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.

The work, published in the journal »Environmental Research Letters«, calculated that comprehensive strategies with the existing technologies could reduce methane emissions by half by 2030. This would slow down the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels or damage to ecosystems, writes the team led by Ilissa Ocko, lead climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and one of the study's lead authors.

Rapid measures to reduce methane emissions could slow global warming by 30 percent, the researchers write. "We come to the conclusion that the expansion and use of heavily unused but available measures to reduce emissions will have significant temperature advantages in the near future that go beyond the advantages of slow or delayed measures," according to the study.

These include stopping oil and gas leaks, rehabilitating disused coal mines, increasing feed supplements for cattle, and broadening the use of technologies to capture emissions from landfills, according to the researchers.

The use of such technologies has the potential to prevent warming of almost a quarter of a degree Celsius by the middle of the century.

It could be half a degree by the end of the century.

The reduction of methane emissions is considered a focus of the climate protection efforts of Joe Biden's US government.

One will invest in the infrastructure for the natural gas production in order to avoid leaks and to seal off abandoned oil and gas wells.

In addition, there should be programs to improve agricultural productivity in order to reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions there too.

Increased emissions from humans

Methane currently accounts for a little less than a quarter of global warming.

In contrast to carbon dioxide, which occurs far more frequently in the earth's atmosphere and lasts there for hundreds of years, methane is usually broken down after a shorter period of time.

But it has a much stronger effect on the climate: over a period of one hundred years it has a 28 times stronger climate effect than CO2, over 20 years the effect is 86 times stronger.

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