COP President Mukhtar Babayev (second from right) applauds the end of the climate summit
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
After a long and fraught night of talks, COP29 in Baku finally concluded in the early hours of 24 November with a deal that will see wealthier countries funnel billions of dollars to poorer countries over the next decade to pay for climate action. Despite the high numbers involved, it is a deal that seemingly pleases no one, and has called the entire COP climate summit process into question.
The finance deal was the main focus of the meeting in Azerbaijan’s capital, with…
A methane plume at least 4.8 kilometres long billows into the atmosphere south of Tehran, Iran
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The world has more ways than ever to spot the invisible methane emissions responsible for a third of global warming so far. But according to a report released at the COP29 climate summit, methane “super-emitters” rarely take action when alerted that they are leaking large amounts of the potent greenhouse gas.
“We’re not seeing the transparency and the sense of urgency that we require,” says Manfredi Caltagirone, director of the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, which recently launched a system that uses satellite data to alert methane emitters about leaks.
Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas to address, behind carbon dioxide, and a rising number of countries have promised to slash methane emissions in order to avoid near-term warming. At last year’s COP28 climate summit, many of the world’s largest oil and gas companies also pledged to “eliminate” methane emissions from their operations.
Today, a growing number of satellites are beginning to detect methane leaks from the biggest sources of such emissions: oil and gas infrastructure, coal mines, landfill and agriculture. That data is critical to holding emitters to account, says Mark Brownstein at the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental advocacy group that recently launched its own methane-sensing satellite. “But data by itself doesn’t solve the problem,” he says.
The first year of the UN methane alert system illustrates the yawning gap between data and action. Over the past year, the programme issued 1225 alerts to governments and companies when it identified plumes of methane from oil and gas infrastructure large enough to be detected from space. It now reports that emitters only took steps to control those leaks 15 times, a response rate of about 1 per cent.
There are a number of possible reasons for this, says Caltagirone. Emitters might lack technical or financial resources and some sources of methane can be difficult to cut off, although emissions from oil and gas infrastructure are widely seen to be the easiest to deal with. “It’s plumbing. It’s not rocket science,” he says.
Another explanation might be that emitters are still getting used to the new alert system. However, other methane monitors have reported a similar lack of response. “Our success rate is not much better,” says Jean-Francois Gauthier at GHGSat, a Canadian company that has issued similar satellite alerts for years. “It’s on the order of 2 or 3 per cent.”
Methane super-emitter plumes detected in 2021
ESA/SRON
There have been some successes. For instance, the UN issued several alerts this year to the Algerian government about a methane source that had been continuously leaking since at least 1999, with a global warming effect equivalent to half a million cars driven for a year. By October, satellite data showed it had disappeared.
But the overall picture suggests monitoring isn’t yet translating into emission reductions. “Simply showing methane plumes is not enough to generate action,” says Rob Jackson at Stanford University in California. A core problem he sees is that satellites rarely reveal who owns the leaky pipeline or the methane-emitting well, making accountability difficult.
Methane is a major topic of discussion at the COP29 meeting, now under way in Baku, Azerbaijan. A summit this week on “non-CO2 greenhouse gases”, convened by the US and China, saw countries announce several actions on methane emissions. They include a fee on methane in the US, which is aimed at oil and gas emitters – although many expect the incoming Trump administration to undo that rule.
Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is located on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, but falling water levels could leave the city and oil infrastructure cut off from the sea
VANO SHLAMOV/AFP via Getty Images
Ports, oil drilling rigs and coastal settlements will be marooned kilometres from the shore as climate change drives water loss in the Caspian Sea, according to a study that highlights the huge economic threat global warming poses to Azerbaijan, the host of the COP29 climate summit.
Water levels are already falling fast in the Caspian, the world’s largest inland body of water, in…
Wildfires in the tropics drove some increase in CO2 emissions but the bulk was driven by burning fossil fuels
Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels in 2024 are set to blow past last year’s record levels, dashing hopes this year will see the planet-warming emissions peak.
“Reducing emissions is more urgent than ever and there’s only one way to do it: massively reduce fossil emissions,” says Pierre Friedlingstein at the University of Exeter, UK.
That is according to the latest Global Carbon Budget report, a preliminary accounting of CO2 emissions to date with projections to the end of the year, produced by Friedlingstein and his colleagues. It was released at the COP29 summit now underway in Azerbaijan, where countries aim to set new financial targets to address climate change.
Last year, some researchers were forecasting a peak in emissions in 2024, but the report finds human-caused CO2 emissions are set to reach a record 41.6 gigatonnes in 2024, a 2 per cent rise on 2023’s record. Almost 90 per cent of that total consists of emissions from burning fossil fuels. The rest is from changes in the land driven mostly by deforestation and wildfires.
At 0.8 per cent, the growth rate of fossil fuel emissions is half that of 2023, although it remains higher than the average rate over the past decade. “[The slower rate] is a good sign, but it’s still miles away from where we need to get,” says Friedlingstein.
Despite a long-term downward trend, projected emissions from land use change also increased this year, largely due to drought-driven wildfires in the tropics. Some of the increase is also down to a collapse of the carbon land sink in 2023, which usually removes about a quarter of our annual CO2 emissions from the atmosphere. This sink declined by more than 40 per cent last year and the early part of 2024 as global temperatures spiked under the influence of El Niño.
“2023 is an incredible demonstration of what can happen in a warmer world when we had peak records in global temperatures combined with El Niño droughts and fires,” says Pep Canadell at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, a co-author of the report. “Put all these things together and last year we had almost a third less help removing atmospheric CO2 by the world’s forests than we have had over the last decade.”
While this also added to emissions in 2024, the researchers expect this “land carbon sink” has mostly recovered as the warming influence of El Niño has faded. “It’s not a long-term collapse,” says Friedlingstein.
The report finds CO2 emissions in China, which generates nearly a third of the global total, are only projected to increase by 0.2 per cent in 2024 compared to 2023. Canadell says that because of the large margin of error in this projection of China’s emissions, it is actually possible they have stayed steady or gone down. India’s emissions also increased at a slower rate than last year, rising by just under 5 per cent. In the US and the EU, emissions continued to decline, albeit at a much slower rate than last year.
Hot temperatures that boost electricity demand to power air conditioning are also a key reason why fossil fuel emissions have continued to rise despite the massive build-out of renewables in 2024, says Neil Grant at Climate Analytics, a think tank in Germany. Whether due to electric vehicles, data centres or manufacturing, “most people have been caught a bit surprised by the level of electricity demand this year”, he says.
If emissions continue at this level, the report finds that within six years the world will exceed its remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and will exceed the budget to stay within 2°C warming within 27 years.
“We have to accelerate, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate the transition to renewable energy,” says Candell. “Climate change is like a slippery slope that we can just keep falling down. We need to slam on the brakes as hard as we can so we can stop falling.”
COP29 will begin on 11 November in Baku, Azerbaijan
Aziz Karimov/Getty Images
In just a few days’ time, thousands of delegates from almost every country on Earth will arrive in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The meeting is a chance for countries to come together and thrash out the international response to rising global temperatures, against a backdrop of record-breaking temperatures, devastating storms, flooding, heatwaves and droughts.
These climate summits, known as Conferences of the Parties (COPs), are notorious for being a world unto…
