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Published January 2022 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Regional trends and drivers of the global methane budget

Abstract

The ongoing development of the Global Carbon Project (GCP) global methane (CH₄) budget shows a continuation of increasing CH₄ emissions and CH₄ accumulation in the atmosphere during 2000–2017. Here, we decompose the global budget into 19 regions (18 land and 1 oceanic) and five key source sectors to spatially attribute the observed global trends. A comparison of top-down (TD) (atmospheric and transport model-based) and bottom-up (BU) (inventory- and process model-based) CH₄ emission estimates demonstrates robust temporal trends with CH₄ emissions increasing in 16 of the 19 regions. Five regions—China, Southeast Asia, USA, South Asia, and Brazil—account for >40% of the global total emissions (their anthropogenic and natural sources together totaling >270 Tg CH₄ yr⁻¹ in 2008–2017). Two of these regions, China and South Asia, emit predominantly anthropogenic emissions (>75%) and together emit more than 25% of global anthropogenic emissions. China and the Middle East show the largest increases in total emission rates over the 2000 to 2017 period with regional emissions increasing by >20%. In contrast, Europe and Korea and Japan show a steady decline in CH₄ emission rates, with total emissions decreasing by ~10% between 2000 and 2017. Coal mining, waste (predominantly solid waste disposal) and livestock (especially enteric fermentation) are dominant drivers of observed emissions increases while declines appear driven by a combination of waste and fossil emission reductions. As such, together these sectors present the greatest risks of further increasing the atmospheric CH₄ burden and the greatest opportunities for greenhouse gas abatement.

Additional Information

© 2021 The Authors. Global Change Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This article has been contributed to by US Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Issue Online: 02 December 2021; Version of Record online: 27 October 2021; Accepted manuscript online: 23 September 2021; Manuscript accepted: 12 September 2021; Manuscript revised: 02 October 2021; Manuscript received: 02 October 2020. This paper is the result of a collaborative international effort under the umbrella of the Global Carbon Project, a Global Research Project of Future Earth and a research partner of the World Climate Research Programme. We acknowledge primary support for the methane budget from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF5439 "Advancing Understanding of the Global Methane Cycle" to Stanford University (P.I. Rob Jackson; co-P.I.s Philippe Bousquet, Marielle Saunois, Josep Canadell, Gustaf Hugelius, and Ben Poulter). Josep Canadell acknowledges the support of the Australian National Environmental Science Program – Earth Systems and Climate Change. Prabir K Patra and Neveen Chandra acknowledge support from Environment Research and Technology Development Funds of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan (JPMEERF20182002, JPMEERF20172001). Jurek Müller thanks for support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (#200020_172476). Peter Bergamaschi acknowledges the support of ECMWF providing computing resources under the special project "Improve European and global CH₄ and N₂O flux inversions (2018-2020)". Pierre Regnier acknowledges the support from the VERIFY project under European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program grant agreement no. 776810. The TM5-CAMS inversions are available from https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu; Arjo Segers acknowledges the support from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission (grant no. CAMS73). William Riley acknowledges support by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research, Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program through the RUBISCO Scientific Focus Area under contract DE-AC02-05CH11231 to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The authors gratefully acknowledge those responsible for the global network of atmospheric observations used in this study including Donald R Blake and Isobel Simpson, University of California Irvine, USA; Gordon Brailsford, NIWA, Cyril Crevosier, LMD, France; New Zealand; Paul Krummel and Ray Langenfelds, CSIRO, Australia; Toshinobu Machida, Yasunori Tohjima and Yukio Yoshida, NIES, Japan; Ronald Prinn, MIT, USA; Simon O'Doherty, University of Bristol, UK; Michel Ramonet, LSCE-IPSL, France; Atsushi Takizawa, JMA, Japan; Ray Weiss, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, USA and Doug Worthy, Environment Canada, Canada. We would also like to thank Lena Höglund-Isaksson, IIASA, Austria, Greet Janssens-Maenhout EC-JRC, Italy and Steven Smith, PNNL-JGCR, USA for their assistance with the anthropogenic inventory data. The authors also acknowledge the significant contribution of Goulven G. Laruelle, Department Geoscience, Environment & Society, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium who, with P. Regnier, developed the regionally distributed estuarine flux data set. The authors declare that there are no competing financial interests. Data Availability Statement: A number of data sets were used to support the findings of this study. These data sets are either openly available in repositories as listed in the text and references, available on request from the original developers (see text and references there in) or are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023