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African rice cultivation linked to rising methane

Nature Climate Change volume 14, pages 148–151 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Africa has been identified as a major driver of the current rise in atmospheric methane, and this has been attributed to emissions from wetlands and livestock. Here we show that rapidly increasing rice cultivation is another important source, and we estimate that it accounts for 7% of the current global rise in methane emissions. Continued rice expansion to feed a rapidly growing population should be considered in climate change mitigation goals.

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Fig. 1: Harvested rice area in Africa.
Fig. 2: Country-level rice emissions and their trends in Africa for 2008–2018.

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Data availability

The Food and Agriculture Organization database (FAOSTAT) is available at https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL. Methane emission estimates from the GCP are available at https://www.icos-cp.eu/GCP-CH4/2019. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The mathematical algorithm used for the methane emission estimation in our work is publicly available at https://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/2019rf/pdf/4_Volume4/19R_V4_Ch05_Cropland.pdf.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Carbon Monitoring System and by the Harvard University Climate Change Solutions Fund. We thank L. Höglund-Isaksson (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria) and M. Hayek (New York University, United States) for their advice on African rice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Zichong Chen, Nicholas Balasus, Haipeng Lin & Daniel J. Jacob

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Hannah Nesser

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  1. Zichong Chen
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Contributions

Z.C. and D.J.J. contributed to the study conceptualization. Z.C. conducted the data collection and analysis with contributions from D.J.J., N.B., H.L. and H.N. Z.C. and D.J.J. wrote the paper with input from all authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zichong Chen.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Shushi Peng and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Table 1.

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Source Data Fig. 1

Data for both panels of Fig. 1.

Source Data Fig. 2

Data for both panels of Fig. 2.

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Chen, Z., Balasus, N., Lin, H. et al. African rice cultivation linked to rising methane. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 148–151 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01907-x

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