Canada is one of 155 nations that signed the Global Methane Pledge. GMP promises to reduce methane (CH₄) emissions by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Despite the commitments, atmospheric concentration of the greenhouse gas is increasing faster now than at any time since the 1980s.

Methane emissions result primarily from fossil fuel production, agriculture, waste management, and other human activities, including flooding of hydropower reservoirs like the one behind BC’s Site C dam.

The Global Carbon Project is an international research project chaired by Stanford University Professor Rob Jackson. Recent messages from the organization include:

• CH₄ emissions from human activities have increased by 20% (61 million metric tons of CH4 per year) in the past two decades.

• CH₄ accumulation in the atmosphere has accelerated in the past decade, with higher growth rates over the past three years (2020-2022) than any previous observed year since 1986 when reliable measurements from a wider network began.

• CH₄ is a 28 times more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 over a time horizon of 100 years, but 80 times more powerful than CO2 over a time horizon of 20 years.

• In addition to climate impacts, CH₄ is a precursor of tropospheric ozone formation, a greenhouse gas and a pollutant for air quality, damaging human and ecosystem and crop health.

• The observed atmospheric CH₄ concentrations in the past decade follows the trends of the most pessimistic illustrative future GHG trajectories used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that lead to global mean temperatures above 3°C by the end of this century, underscoring the urgency of reducing anthropogenic CH₄ emissions.