Cutting methane emissions key to slowing warming: UN

May 9 ------ Industry could cheaply and easily slash humanity’s methane emissions by at least 30 percent in a decade, the United Nations said Thursday, adding that such cuts would slow global warming and prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths. Curbing emissions of methane from farming, fossil fuel operations and waste management is a crucial part of efforts to restrain runaway climate change.

The powerful greenhouse gas, which is short-lived but many times more potent than carbon dioxide, also contributes to toxic air pollution, harming human health, plants, and ecosystems. Certain sectors already have it in their power to dramatically cut their emissions, according to the new Global Methane Assessment by the UN-led Climate and Clean Air Coalition. Technical solutions — mostly in the fossil fuel and waste sectors — are “readily available” and can reduce humanity’s methane emissions by more than 30 percent this decade, the analysis found.

Together with other measures that are currently available, the reduction could be as much as 45 percent, it said. Many of these solutions are low cost and some even have “negative” costs, meaning that they would more than pay for themselves, the report found. It said the more ambitious 45 percent reduction could avoid nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming over the next two decades and reduce ground level ozone pollution.

It would also, each year, prevent 255,000 premature deaths, 73 billion hours of lost labor from extreme heat, 775,000 asthma-related hospital visits, as well as effectively increasing global crop yields by 26 million tons. “Fast and ambitious methane mitigation is one of the best strategies available today to deliver immediate and long-lasting multiple benefits for climate, agriculture, human and ecosystem health,” UN Environment Program (UNEP) chief Inger Andersen said in a forward to the report. She added that methane emission cuts were an opportunity to “simultaneously address our interlinked planetary crises” — ranging across climate, biodiversity, and waste — and “make peace with nature”.

Source: mb.com.ph