page_title: Methane emissions
section_title: By country
hierarchical_section_title: Methane emissions / National reduction policies / By country
caption_attribution_description: English: Methane emissions (Tg CH4 yr−1) for 2017 by region, source category, and latitude. The mean estimates shown arise from the ensemble of top-down inversion models described in Saunois et al (2020).
context_page_description: Global methane emissions are major part of global greenhouse gas emissions. Methane in the atmosphere has an estimated 100-year global warming potential of 34, meaning that a ton of methane emitted into the atmosphere creates approximately 34 times the atmospheric warming as a ton of carbon dioxide over a period of 100 years. Atmospheric methane concentrations have reached almost two-and-a-half times pre-industrial levels or 3.2 billion tons. Though methane traps far more heat than the same mass of carbon dioxide, it remains in the atmosphere only about a decade, while carbon dioxide potentially warms for a much longer time period assuming no change in rates of carbon sequestration. On a 20-year timescale, a mass of methane is about 85 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth, but on a 100-year timescale, it is projected to be only about 28-34 times more powerful, on the assumption the carbon dioxide will not be sequestered and will continue to warm the earth for decades after the methane is gone.
  60 percent of methane emissions are caused by humans and livestock animals, while natural sources such as wetlands cause about 40 percent of methane emissions.
caption: Methane emissions for 2017 by region, source category, and latitude.[16]
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