ESM2025 Paper: Exploring methane emissions and mitigation strategies through Earth System Models

The Global Methane Pledge, a commitment to reduce global anthropogenic methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030, represents an important step towards mitigating the impact of this potent greenhouse gas on the Earth’s climate. However, for climate policy and actions to meet this ambitious goal, a thorough understanding of the complex processes driving methane emissions and their interactions with the Earth’s climate system is fundamental.

Earth System Models (ESMs) are powerful tools for predicting future climate change and informing climate policy, but most still have significant uncertainties in their representations of methane sources, sinks, and transport. This limits their ability to accurately project future methane emissions and burden and their impact on the climate system, and thus to assess the feasibility and outcomes of methane-based mitigation policies. To overcome these limitations, several modelling groups within the framework of ESM2025 are developing a new generation of ESMs, which explicitly simulate the methane cycle and its feedbacks with the broader Earth system.

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