Methane Pledge Falls Short: New Study Shows 11% Cuts Are Not Enough to Bend the Curve

Methane is the second-largest driver of global warming after carbon dioxide, and despite years of pledges, its concentrations in the atmosphere continue to climb. A new study led by researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), coauthored by colleagues at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), offers the most detailed picture yet of whether the world’s governments are actually on track to deliver the cuts they have promised. The findings, published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, are sobering but not hopeless: current national plans would bend the methane curve for the first time in decades, yet they fall far short of the ambitious international target set in 2021.

The study, an update and follow-up to the analysis delivered by the same team in UNEP’s Global Methane Status Report 2025, finds that if governments fully implement the methane reduction plans they have submitted so far, global emissions would fall by roughly 11 percent between 2020 and 2030. That would be a genuine turning point, reversing the current trend of rising methane emissions. But it would not be enough to meet the goal of the Global Methane Pledge, the international initiative launched in 2021 under which 159 countries and the European Commission committed to jointly reducing global methane emissions by 30 percent between 2020 and 2030. The researchers’ detailed assessment shows that a 22 percent reduction could be achieved at relatively low cost, while a 30 percent reduction would nearly exhaust the mitigation potential that existing technology can deliver.

The urgency behind these numbers stems from methane’s peculiar chemistry. Human activities account for approximately two-thirds of global methane emissions, with about 40 percent each coming from the energy and agricultural sectors and 20 percent from waste and wastewater. Since pre-industrial times, methane has contributed around 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming, roughly one-third of the warming observed to date. What makes methane such a critical lever for climate policy is its combination of high warming potential and a relatively short atmospheric lifetime of about a decade. Unlike carbon dioxide, which persists for centuries, methane molecules break down quickly. That means every tonne of methane avoided today delivers a measurable cooling effect within years rather than generations, making decisive and immediate emission cuts the most effective means of controlling the pace of global warming over the next few decades.

The purpose of the new analysis is to give policymakers an independent and consistent assessment of which sectors and regions can reduce methane emissions the most, and at what cost. That information matters as governments prepare to propose and negotiate new international targets for methane reductions. To support such policy processes, the study is accompanied by a comprehensive dataset published on Zenodo, providing detailed country-level and regional estimates of the potentials and costs of different technical solutions for controlling methane emissions in each source sector. This granularity allows negotiators to see precisely where the cheapest tonnes of abatement are hiding, from gas pipeline repairs in one hemisphere to landfill gas capture in another.

The researchers highlight a concerning fact at the heart of their findings: the plans countries have submitted on how they intend to achieve the pledge could at best reduce emissions by 11 percent, which is significant but plainly insufficient. The authors nevertheless insist that the 30 percent target is technically achievable, although difficult, given the short time now remaining before the pledge’s target year of 2030. The gap between what has been promised and what has been planned is therefore not a matter of physics or engineering, but of policy ambition, financing, and enforcement.

Lena Höglund-Isaksson, an IIASA researcher and lead author of the study, argues that the window is narrowing but still open. “It is late, but not too late to achieve significant and meaningful reductions in methane emissions,” she says. “Our research shows that the costs of implementing methane mitigation technology are considerably lower than the costs of dealing with the resulting climate impacts. Right now there is a political momentum to press for increasingly ambitious methane mitigation efforts to shave off a few tenths of degrees of global warming until 2050. This may not sound like much, but could very well be the difference between a stable future climate and a climate that lapses out of control because temporary overshoot in temperature sets critical tipping points in motion that could undermine the foundations for human livelihoods.”

The source sector with the greatest potential for low-cost reductions is the fossil fuel industry. According to the study, about 70 percent of the technical mitigation potential available for 2030 comes from reducing the venting and flaring of associated gas during oil and gas production, controlling leakage along oil and gas production and transportation chains, and limiting methane emissions from coal mining. These are largely proven, off-the-shelf interventions: capturing gas that would otherwise be vented or flared, detecting and repairing leaks with increasingly sensitive satellite and ground-based monitoring, and improving mine ventilation air methane capture. Because captured gas can often be sold, many of these measures pay for themselves, which is precisely why the researchers describe them as low-cost relative to the climate damages they avert.

The solid waste sector represents another major opportunity. Diverting organic waste away from landfills and into circular treatment systems, such as composting and anaerobic digestion, would cut emissions while recovering valuable materials and energy. At the same time, managing methane from legacy landfills remains essential, because organic material buried in landfills continues to decompose and release methane for decades after disposal. This long tail of emissions, the authors note, calls for urgent measures to transition to circular waste systems on a global scale, particularly as waste volumes grow in rapidly urbanizing regions.

Agriculture remains the hardest sector to abate. Technical solutions do exist for controlling methane from rice fields, through water and residue management, and from livestock manure management, through covered storage and biogas recovery. However, the technical mitigation potential from the largest agricultural source, enteric fermentation emissions from ruminating livestock, is limited. The digestive processes of cattle, sheep, and goats are difficult to engineer around at scale, and the sheer number of animals involved makes even small per-animal reductions expensive to achieve globally. The study emphasizes that maintaining low emissions beyond 2050 would also require reduced use of fossil fuels and consumption shifts toward healthier and more sustainable diets, linking methane policy to broader transformations in energy and food systems.

The study was conducted within the framework of two Horizon Europe projects, the IM4CA project and the EU-China Bridge Project, and benefited from additional funding from the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the Korea Environmental Industry & Technology Institute. Its message to negotiators gathering to consider new international methane targets is unambiguous: the technology exists, the costs are manageable, and the climate benefits are immediate. What remains uncertain is whether political will can close the gap between an 11 percent trajectory and the 30 percent promise. With roughly a third of current warming attributable to methane, and tipping points looming on the horizon, the difference between those two numbers may well shape the stability of the climate system for decades to come.

Subject of Research: Global anthropogenic methane emission reduction potential and progress toward the Global Methane Pledge

Article Title: Getting back on track to reduce methane emissions

Article References: Getting back on track to reduce methane emissions. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: methane, Global Methane Pledge, climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, IIASA, UNEP, fossil fuels, agriculture, landfills, emission mitigation, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, climate policy