Methane is a short-lived, powerful greenhouse gas, currently responsible for 0.5°C of current warming—roughly a third. Staying within safer climate guardrails depends on sharp decreases in its atmospheric levels. However, atmospheric methane levels continue to rise. Cutting anthropogenic methane emissions is our first and most important tool to start bending the curve. At the same time, though, natural methane sources are expected to increase in a warming world. Scientists are increasingly concerned that these changes have already started, and that methane emissions from tropical wetlands are rising today. Permafrost thaw adds additional risk this century, and emissions from both systems will only get worse with more warming.
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The emerging field of methane removal may help to address a portion of methane-driven warming and mitigate some of the risks from increasing natural methane emissions, but it cannot replace aggressive greenhouse gas emissions reductions or carbon dioxide removal. Much more research is needed to determine the feasibility and safety of methane removal approaches before deployment could responsibly be considered. This emerging solutions set has unique needs that will require significant support to facilitate integrated research programs and engage partners towards standing up a pragmatic and collaborative new field. 

Methane removal approaches could help manage climate risk, particularly in light of rising natural methane emissions.

Methane removal is not a replacement for emissions reductions or carbon dioxide removal.

Should they prove feasible and safe, any deployment of methane removal approaches would need to be in addition to, not instead of, other climate solutions. Any future methane removal capacity should be strictly additive to greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and maximal carbon dioxide removal capacity, each of which will have their own scaling considerations.

Greenhouse gases are not interchangeable. Emissions reductions and removals are not, either.

Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, while methane stays in the atmosphere for decades. Targets for reductions in both should be managed separately, as their impacts are not fully interchangeable.

It’s also important to distinguish between emissions reductions and removal targets. The conversation has mostly been around carbon dioxide to date — we need to both reduce carbon dioxide emissions as aggressively as possible and in parallel enable the scale up of carbon dioxide removal approaches to enable long-term net-negativity, with separate targets also suggested.  

Our overall climate solution portfolio and ambition must grow with further climate challenges, such as anthropogenically amplified natural feedbacks. In the same way that carbon dioxide and methane emissions reductions are not interchangeable, and carbon dioxide reductions and removals should be assessed separately, research towards potential methane removal approaches will need to advance strategically to ensure that our climate ambition scales to match available solutions, rather than substituting continued emissions.