Methane Rising Faster Than Other Greenhouse Gases: Researchers

Paris, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Sep, 2024) Concentrations of the powerful greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere are rising at an accelerating pace, threatening efforts by countries to meet their climate targets, researchers warned Tuesday.

"Methane is rising faster in relative terms than any major greenhouse gas and is now 2.6-fold higher than in pre-industrial times," said an international group of researchers under the aegis of the Global Carbon Project in a study published in Environmental Research Letters.

Methane is the second-largest greenhouse gas produced by human activity after carbon dioxide, with agriculture, energy production and organic waste rotting in landfills the major sources.

In the first 20 years its impact on the atmosphere is about 80 times that of carbon dioxide, but it breaks down quicker.

That opens a possibility to sharply reduce climate impact in the short term, but the researchers found that despite efforts to cut methane emissions that atmospheric concentrations of the gas are still rising.

An average of 6.1 million tonnes of methane were added to atmosphere per year in the 2000s. That rose to 20.9 million tonnes per in the 2010s. It hit 41.8 million tonnes in 2020.

"Anthropogenic emissions have continued to increase in almost every other country in the world, with the exception of Europe and Australia, which show a slow declining trend," Global Carbon Project executive director Pep Canadell, and one of the study's co-authors, told AFP.

Rising methane pollution is running at cross purposes of efforts to keep the global warming under 2 degrees Celsius.

A "Global Methane Pledge" was launched int 2021 by the European Union and United States to cut global methane emissions 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030.