Category: Methane

A Preview of COP31

As some of you may recall, since the summer of 2023, I have had the privilege of directing a university-wide effort – the Harvard Initiative on Reducing on Global Methane Emissions – with support from the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.  Next week, at COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, I will be making two presentations with my Harvard colleague, Professor Daniel Jacob, in regard to about two of the twenty-six individual research and outreach projects that are part of the Harvard methane initiative. 

One is the main focus of today’s essay, because it is very much at the heart of the UNFCCC process, including the Paris Agreement, and COP31 – using satellite-based estimates of national methane emissions to facilitate the process.  The other, which I will describe in a blog post subsequent to COP31, is work with my Harvard Kennedy School colleague, Joe Aldy, Harvard Business School Professor Forest Reinhardt, and Tracy Zhou, Harvard Public Policy PhD student, focused on estimating the marginal abatement costs of reducing methane emissions in the oil & gas (O&G) sector.

Before I turn to my major topic today, here is some information about the COP31 event focused on the second project above:  “Reducing Methane Emissions: Abatement Costs in the Oil and Gas Sector,” Wednesday, November 18, 1:00 – 2:30 PM TRT, Pavilion of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), Blue Zone, COP-31.  Panelists will include Daniel Jacob, myself, and others to be announced.  For background on this session, see this linked paper, released earlier in the abatement-cost project. 

Now I will turn to my major focus today.

Advancing Reporting of Satellite-Based Methane Emissions Estimates    to Support International Climate Policy Processes

In brief, the goal of this project with Daniel Jacob, Willow Fortunoff, and a host of talented pre-docs and post-docs from Daniel’s team, is to produce consistent national methane emissions estimates using a common methodology worldwide – the Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI) tool developed by Daniel’s team – as technical input to the Second Global Stocktake (GST2), and to encourage countries to use the IMI to strengthen their methane inventories and climate reporting under the Paris Agreement, including the Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) due December 2026.

If you want to learn more about the IMI tool and our outreach strategy, here’s video of a press conference we held earlier this week, and a good article about the underlying research is here.  If either of those are more than you want to watch or read, here’s a very brief description of the IMI tool, followed by an overview of our outreach strategy.

The IMI Tool

The Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI) is a free, open-source software tool that uses satellite observations to estimate how much methane a country emits at national, subnational, and sectoral levels. It helps countries check and improve the emissions figures they report to the United Nations. 

Here’s how it works.  The IMI starts with a country’s own national methane inventory, that is, its estimates to the UNfrom sources such as oil and gas operations, agriculture, and waste.  It then combines that starting estimate with daily, global observations of atmospheric methane from the TROPOMI satellite instrument (operating since 2018), plus data from other satellites that detect individual sources. Weather data help the tool account for how winds carry methane from its source to the places where satellites observe it.  Using this evidence, the IMI adjusts the country’s initial estimate. The results show estimated emissions across the country in areas roughly 12-25 kilometers across, along with a range that expresses the uncertainty in each estimate.  The IMI also shows national totals for emissions from human activity and estimates by sector.

What makes the IMI estimates different from other estimates?  Other satellite tools measure releases from individual sites, such as a leaking oil or gas facility. Those measurements help identify large emitters, but they do not provide a country’s total annual emissions. And, importantly, the IMI uses a common methodology for every country, allowing users to compare the results.

And here is what makes these estimates particularly reliable.  The IMI uses established scientific methods described in over 50 peer-reviewed publications. Its code is publicly available, its methods are documented, and it is designed for non-expert use. A 2025 study by James East (formerly a postdoc with Daniel Jacob and now a faculty member at MIT) and colleagues reports its estimates of methane emissions from human activity worldwide, country by country. Users can explore the results through an interactive web interface.

Using These National Estimates in Support of UNFCCC Processes

The Harvard team is helping governments, NGOs, and international institutions interpret and use the IMI national methane emission results.  Here is a brief overview of our communications and engagement strategy.

Let’s start with the Paris Climate Agreement, under which countries submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) every 5 years, and countries submit Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) every 2 years under the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) of Article 13.  Whereas the NDCs are forward-looking, the BTRs are backward-looking, with the BTRs providing descriptions of progress towards NDCs, as well as self-assessment.  These are due December 31, 2026.

Another part of the Paris Agreement is the Global Stocktake, the second of which (GST2, 2024-2028) is being launched at COP31.  This assesses collective global progress toward meeting goals of the Paris Agreement, and the inputs include Party-reported ETF data, IPCC and other scientific assessments, and non-Party submissions.  The Information Collection and Preparation phase begins in late 2026, and our submission will be due in February 2027.

We build upon the IMI’s methodologically-consistent, high-resolution, satellite-informed estimates of national methane emissions, including sectoral detail, and then our strategic approach is to provide input to and support of both policy channels – the BTRs and GST2.  Our objectivefor December 2026 is that 10–20 countries use our IMI estimates as supporting evidence in their 2026 BTRs.  We are sharing country-level policy briefs with more than 40 countries, discussing each country’s specific concerns during a series of bilateral meetings.  The 40+ Fact Sheets can be downloaded here.  Here’s an example of one of the country fact sheets.

Finally, another element of our work in Antalya on this project is our Harvard Side Event at COP31 (“Quantifying and Communicating Methane Emissions for NDCs and the Global Methane Pledge,” Thursday, November 19, 2026 | 4:45 – 6:15 PM TRT, Side Event Room Yellow, Blue Zone, COP-31, with:  Dan Cusworth, Vice President for Science, Carbon Mapper; Daniel Jacob, Harvard University; Amanda McKee, Director for Knowledge and Learning, NDC Partnership; and myself). 

I hope very much to see some of you at COP31!

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Key Takeaways from COP30 in Belém

The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Belém, Brazil, concluded last week, and so – as I have done every year for about 20 years, I will offer my personal views about major takeaways from COP30.

Let’s begin by recognizing that the “Belém Package” was adopted, in which 195 Parties approved a broad set of nearly 30 individual decisions that cover many elements of international climate change policy going forward.

But what about specifics?  As always, there’s good news and bad news.  This year, I will begin with what I think of as disappointments and problematic outcomes, and then I will turn to one potentially very important outcome, which I don’t think has been sufficiently covered by much of the news media.

Disappointments and Problematic Outcomes

A Missing Statement about Phasing Out Fossil Fuels       

As was the case with COP29 post-mortems last year, the press has focused in its COP30 coverage on the conference’s final statement (or lack thereof) regarding the future of fossil fuels.  A year ago, I wrote at this blog about why such focus on what is at best a non-binding resolution was misplaced and given too much attention (What Happened at COP29 in Baku?, November 29, 2024).  This year, attention has again been focused unduly on the fact that the COP’s closing statement did not go beyond or even explicitly endorse the CO28 statement about “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, about which I also wrote at this blog (What Really Happened at COP-28 in Dubai, December 15, 2023).

So, there’s been abundant hand-wringing that the final COP30 language was weaker than many had hoped, and certainly did not include a formal fossil-fuel phase-out roadmap.  I won’t argue that such symbolic pronouncements, when made, are irrelevant, but the fact remains that these statements are only aspirational, and not tied in any meaningful way to the heart of the Paris Agreement’s implementation, namely the 195 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

What Happened to the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF)?

On November 6, 2025, the COP President, André Corrêa do Lago, formally launched this initiative to pay for tropical countries to conserve standing forests.  With support from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, expectations were high, with the ultimate target being a fund of $125 billion.  But the funding committed at COP 30, somewhat less than $7 billion, was less than expected.

The Just Transition Mechanism

A new “Belém Action Mechanism for Just Transition” is intended to provide a structured, multilateral framework to manage the transition from carbon-intensive economies to low-carbon economies in a just, equitable, inclusive way that protects workers, communities, and vulnerable populations. This is an important issue, because not only does climate change bring about economic damages, but so do climate change policies.  

The Belém text seems to refer only to developing countries, but since the time of COP3 in 1997 (where the Kyoto Protocol was adopted), the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) — a coalition of oil-exporting Arab states — has pushed for compensation for economic losses to the oil trade triggered by mitigation policies.  So, this new mechanism could have some significant unintended consequences.

The Global Implementation Accelerator

This was launched in Belém to quickly start high-impact, short-term climate actions, such as for reducing methane emission and implementing nature-based carbon removal. This is clearly meritorious, but what will the “Accelerator” actually do?  It is fundamentally voluntary, and requires significant finance.  So, it remains little more than a statement of intentions, unless this leads to national plans which are anchored in clear paths for finance & implementation.

Tripling Adaptation Finance

Countries committed in Belém to triple adaptation finance by 2035 to help vulnerable nations.  This means raising the adaptation finance target from roughly $40 billion/year (set in 2021) to about $120 billion per year by 2035.  The Paris Agreement is largely about mitigation (via the NDCs), and recently an ex post fund for Loss and Damage was launched.  But between these is the need for adaptation (It’s Not Too Soon to Take Climate Change Adaptation Seriously, November 7, 2021).  So the increased attention is merited, but there is no indication of a credible pathway that would unlock private capital and innovation, which is surely needed.

A Potentially Very Important Outcome

The negotiators in Belém launched a “Trade-Climate Dialogue” with a two-year work program on how international trade can support equitable climate action.  This, in my judgement, is potentially very important, partly because of the topic and partly because an actual program of work is specified for the countries to undertake.

A few days ago, I discussed this (plus the four concerns I’ve outlined above) with an excellent journalist from Newsweek – Jeff Young, the magazine’s Environment and Sustainability Editor.  I thought that some of my responses might make it into the article he was intending to write about CO30 outcomes, but it turned out that he published what is essentially an interview (not about my four concerns with COP30, but exclusively focused on the “potentially very important outcome” of COP30.  So, rather than summarizing or revising his prose and my responses to his questions, I am simply offering below Jeff Young’s article, which I hope you’ll find of interest.

Harvard Economist Cites ‘Important’ COP30 Development on Climate and Trade

Nov 25, 2025

By Jeff Young

Environment and Sustainability Editor

The COP30 climate talks launched two weeks ago amid high expectations for progress in Belém, Brazil. After 10 years of the Paris Climate Agreement, new national commitments to cut greenhouse gases were due and momentum was building for an international plan to phase out the world’s use of fossil fuels.

Further, the COP30 setting at the mouth of the Amazon River stressed the importance of forests and nature conservation in the climate fight, and Brazil was set to unveil a new way to fund forest protections.

But early signs of progress at the talks seemed to bog down in the tropical heat. By the time negotiators took up the idea of a “road map” to phase out fossil fuels, a fire in the venue forced a temporary evacuation and offered fitting symbolism for a COP going down in flames.

On Saturday, the talks closed with mixed results at best: financing for forests grew but not to the hoped-for levels; national plans still came short of the Paris target; and the COP30 final document did not call for new action to end fossil fuels.

“My own judgment is that the outcomes were a combination of disappointing, problematic and potentially important,” Harvard economist and veteran COP observer Robert Stavins told Newsweek. Stavins directs both the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the school’s Project on Climate Agreements and he has attended close to 20 of the annual United Nations climate gatherings.

Stavins said that with the Trump administration abandoning the Paris Agreement and ignoring COP30 (for the first time in COP history, the U.S. did not send an official delegation), the realistic expectations for a strong outcome were low.

However, he said, COP30 produced a “potentially important” development on global trade and climate, a relatively new topic in the COP process.

The European Union has tied trade to climate action with the adoption of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), a means of pricing the greenhouse gas emissions involved in the manufacturing of many products the E.U. imports. In effect, CBAM is a CO2 tariff on carbon-intensive products, including iron and steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizers, hydrogen, and electricity.

In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Stavins said a dialogue on trade launched at COP30 could serve to overcome some objections to the CBAM and encourage other countries to take a similar approach to pricing carbon pollution.

Newsweek: Tell me about what you found “potentially important” coming out of COP30.

Robert Stavins: They established what is called a trade and climate dialogue. Obviously, the relationship between international trade and climate change is extremely important and one can view it in lots of ways. Some countries are very hostile towards the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism in the European Union and feel that it’s a way of keeping developing countries mired in poverty through what is essentially environmental protectionism.

The Europeans obviously view it as both necessary for establishing a level playing field but also as a way of inducing other countries to take on domestic carbon pricing mechanisms in order to escape the tariff when they export those specific bulk products: iron and steel and cement, aluminum, a few others, into the European Union.

What’s striking is that they agreed to start a 2-year work program on how international trade can support equitable climate action. Well, once they start a program, then they have to meet and talk about it, they have to put things on paper, so this one actually does have a bit of meat.

There was interest expressed from the Brazilian presidency going into the COP in the notion of something broader than the CBAM:  A number of countries putting in place carbon pricing domestic mechanisms—whether it’s a carbon tax or auctioned allowances under cap and trade—keeping the revenue and then putting in place essentially trade barriers like the CBAM on non-participating countries. In other words, expanding the CBAM into something like a carbon pricing club.

[For this blog essay, let me add that I am referring above to the “Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets,” proposed by Brazil’s Finance Ministry ahead of COP30, initially with 11 supporting parties (Brazil, China, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Armenia, Zambia, and France), and having since expanded to 18 parties.  More to the point, a very promising potential avenue forward for such a coalition (club) is provided by a recent proposal from the Global Climate Policy Project at Harvard and MIT, namely “Building a Climate Coalition: Aligning Carbon Pricing, Trade, and Development,” which I’m pleased to say is the focus of my upcoming podcast episode (and related blog essay) featuring Professor Catherine Wolfram of the MIT-Sloan School of Management.]

Newsweek: That reminds me that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the environment committee, was the sole federal U.S. representative there in Belém and this was one of his top talking points. He called the CBAM “a lifeboat” for climate safety, and I’m wondering if you agree with that assessment.

Stavins: I think it is. I originally saw it as an understandable reaction, trying to make European industry happy, so that they wouldn’t be at a competitive disadvantage. But I was very skeptical of the possibility of it actually inducing other countries to put in place carbon pricing mechanisms. But I was wrong, because in fact other countries are in that process.

Turkey has been completely upfront about the fact that they’re developing a carbon price mechanism for the explicit purpose of not having to pay the CBAM. And I can tell you that I think it’s five other countries that are also developing plans—I can’t comment on some because I’ve been working with them, so it’s confidential. So, to me, that is a potentially very promising development, but I say potentially because, you know, there are a lot of caveats.

Newsweek: One of the caveats there might be what the Trump administration will do in response to this.

Stavins: Obviously, tariffs have been essential to the first ten months of the Trump administration’s policies. Leading up to COP30, the Trump administration tried with several other countries to get them to back down on their NDCs [national commitments to cut CO2 emissions]. And the way they did it was to say, you know and we’ll look upon you favorably in terms of international trade if you do. That failed.

So rather than using trade barriers in a positive way, which I think is what the CBAM is, the Trump administration has been using them in regards to climate change in a negative way.

Newsweek: How big a deal was it that the U.S. wasn’t there? Did that create a sort of leadership void, and did others seek to fill that? I’m thinking of China in particular.

Stavins: The answer is yes. The overall effect is a change of mood. Leading up to the Paris Agreement, the U.S. and China were partners—we never would have gotten the Paris Agreement otherwise.

China now is happy to emerge into sole leadership. China now is emerging and in broader terms than just climate, it is in terms of all kinds of soft power as the U.S. pulls back with the cancelling of USAID and so much else.

Newsweek: What do you think of the future of the COP process itself? There are growing calls for reform to the process—do you see it changing, and do you think it remains relevant?

Stavins: I don’t see it going away because it has a huge constituency. Developing countries don’t walk out on it because they don’t want to jeopardize the process and see something like the G20 take over. So, for that reason, my opinion is that we will continue to have it for quite some time. It will become irrelevant only as an alternative parallel to it emerges and that could be what I described before but it might be something else, but I think it’s going to be with us for a while.

One last thing I’ll say is I would be more optimistic about COP31 in Turkey. Turkey is a very interesting place, they are a real bridge between Europe and Asia, obviously, and Australia is going to have some element of the [COP] presidency. Most importantly, I don’t think expectations are going to be high, and everything in life, whether it’s personal, institutional or political, is relative to expectations.

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Hope and Expectation for Bottom-Up Climate Progress

Vijay Vaitheeswaran, whom I have known and worked with for over 30 years, is the long-time global energy and climate innovation editor at The Economist. In the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Conversations on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” he expresses his appreciation for bottom-up climate approaches. The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.  You can listen to our complete conversation here.

Visionary entrepreneurs and the private sector will play increasingly important roles in driving climate progress, Vijay Vaitheeswaran argues, particularly in an era of what he calls “slowbalization,” during which nations will attempt to regionalize and even nationalize supply chains, and establish industrial policies, a trend he says “will have some deleterious consequences” on climate policy. However, he also notes that there could be some longer-term positive effects.

“From the perspective of emissions, I worry. Making very expensive solar panels at home in America or very unattractive and expensive electric cars that nobody wants to buy because you’re reliant on domestic technology or energy storage [is inefficient]. Another example where we have at scale with quite a lot of innovation embedded cutting edge technologies that are available quite inexpensively because China invested and got them to scale and is making them available, but very high tariffs will keep them out of markets like the U.S. And what will happen?,” he asks. “My prediction is that a number of those technologies will be redirected to the emerging world. If that happens, that would be a good thing. It might even help with a green leapfrog in India or certainly in Africa, Latin America.  It doesn’t matter to the planet where the emissions cuts are made in the long term.”

Vijay observes that much of current-day green energy solutions are driven by the private sector, and that trend, he says, shows no signs of slowing.

“I have a great deal of appreciation for bottom-up forces, understanding that whatever the cycle and rhythm of international negotiations… and the vicissitudes of domestic policy, that in fact the momentum often builds from the bottom-up, from markets, from the role of business, from the opportunities that are created from technology innovation advancing,” he remarks.  “That’s where I keep my eye on both – what’s happening from the top-down… The framework matters, but oftentimes the longer-term trends are determined by what comes from the bottom-up.”

He also notes the trend toward increased use of alternative fuels in several important industrial sectors.

“I think the long game for oil is already in sight that in the long term we know how to electrify transport. That’s a problem that we have a pathway for, certainly in passenger transport. With freight we have to see which technology wins out, whether it is indeed electrification, which is making gains even with freight, even though batteries are heavy and cannot go as far,” he states. “There is an argument for hydrogen or some other kinds of synthetic fuels as well. So, there’s an open competition, but we have pathways to alternatives there. We’re seeing shipping as well moving quite rapidly, in fact, towards some alternatives… to petroleum-based fuels.”

As these alternative fuel technologies come to scale, Vaitheeswaran says, they will help the world lessen its reliance on oil, thereby reducing global CO₂ emissions.

“The way we should work for change faster is to develop these alternatives, make them attractive, make them affordable, keeping in mind energy poverty is still a significant problem for 800 million to a billion people around the world [who have] little or no access to modern energy and to accommodate a world that’s going to use much more energy in future, and rightly so, in developing countries. And in developed countries, of course with the AI surge, we will certainly use more energy for that purpose – to make it clean and firm,” he remarks. “So, I think those are the kinds of outlines of… [a] future that probably calls for fossil fuels to be with us for some time and for more thought in how we think about the emissions from those fuels.”

Vijay also addresses the challenges posed by upstream methane, an issue which has become front and center in recent climate negotiations.

“We now understand, although scientists have known this for a very long time, but much more in the political consciousness, that methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short term in the 10-to-20-year timeframe because it does have a shorter life than CO₂,” he says. “And global accords were reached at Dubai, at the COP Summit, and reaffirmed in Baku, to try to dramatically reduce the methane footprint of oil and gas companies during their production process.”

For this and much more, please listen to my complete podcast conversation with Vijay Vaitheeswaran, the 65th episode over the past five years of the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month.  You can find a transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.  Previous episodes have featured conversations with:

“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

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