PARIS: Atmospheric concentrations of the powerful greenhouse gas methane are increasing at an accelerating rate, threatening countries’ efforts to meet their climate targets, scientists warned on Tuesday. “Methane is increasing in relative terms faster than any major greenhouse gas and is now 2.6 times higher than in pre-industrial times,” an international group of researchers under the auspices of the Global Carbon Project said in a study published in Environmental Research Letters. . Methane is the second largest greenhouse gas produced by human activity after carbon dioxide, with the main sources being agriculture, energy production and organic waste rotting in landfills. In the first 20 years, its impact on the atmosphere is about 80 times that of carbon dioxide, but it decays more quickly. This opens up the possibility of significantly reducing the impact on the climate in the short term, but scientists have found that despite efforts to reduce methane emissions, atmospheric concentrations of the gas continue to rise. In 2000, an average of 6.1 million tons of methane was added to the atmosphere annually. This increased to 20.9 million tons in 2010. In 2020, it was 41.8 million tons. “Anthropogenic emissions are still increasing in almost every other country in the world, with the exception of Europe and Australia, which show a slow downward trend,” said Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project and one of the study’s co-authors. . AFP. Growing methane pollution is linked to efforts to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. The European Union and the United States launched the “Global Methane Pledge” in 2021, which aims to reduce global methane emissions by 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030.
