Description
Reducing methane emissions provides one of the most obvious routes available to short-term climate mitigation – a fact that has become widely recognised since the launch of the Global Methane Pledge in 2021, when states pledged to reduce global emissions by 30% by 2030. Yet both methane emissions and atmospheric methane levels continue to rise and, crucially from the perspective of this paper, very little research has so far been conducted on methane policy, regulation or politics in practice, and there exists little good understanding of why progress on methane emissions has been so weak. This paper maps out a framework and agenda for understanding these issues. Drawing upon various strands of work in research in political ecology, environmental politics and cognate fields, it argues that methane politics is distinctive and different from ‘carbon dioxide politics’; and argues, more broadly, that the specific challenges associated with methane require us to refine, and perhaps even completely rethink, some core climate policy frameworks. This paper forms an initial output of the Global Methane Politics project, a five year European Research Council advanced grant-funded project that will run from 2026-2030.
