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Methane emissions from landfills differentially underestimated worldwide

Nature Sustainability volume 7, pages 496–507 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Landfill methane (CH4) emissions account for ~10% of all anthropogenic CH4 emissions globally, amounting to ~50 Tg per year. The current emission inventories utilize a first-order decay model as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In contrast to recent top-down atmospheric inversion results, the mainstream bottom-up inventories exhibit significant biases, largely stemming from the inaccuracy in the a priori decay constant (k), an essential rate-controlling parameter in the model. We improve the k estimation method by incorporating compositional- and environmental-specific corrections, which are readily integrated into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s model. The accuracy of CH4 emission predictions is significantly improved by using the corrected k values, which are benchmarked against the atmospheric inversion results. We extend the emission estimations to landfills worldwide and reveal up to 200% underestimations for individual landfills. Our findings highlight the importance of prioritizing landfill CH4 emission monitoring and reduction as one of the most cost-effective mitigation options to achieve current climate goals.

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Fig. 1: Background and workflow of this study.
Fig. 2: Survey of the reported k values worldwide.
Fig. 3: Error analysis of kIPCC and kCMT compared with kr.
Fig. 4: Comparison among Qr, QCMT and QIPCC.
Fig. 5: Extending ΣQCMT estimations to global landfills.

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Data availability

All data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its supplementary files. The public data used in this paper were obtained from the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) (v.8.0, https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset_ghg80), the UNFCCC Greenhouse Gas Data Interface (https://di.unfccc.int/), the Climate Watch Database (https://www.climatewatchdata.org/ghg-emissions), the LMOP landfill and project database (https://www.epa.gov/lmop/lmop-landfill-and-project-database) and the Database of Global Administrative Areas (https://gadm.org/index.html).

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Acknowledgements

The authors received no specific funding for this work. We acknowledge Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, for providing research scholarships for this study. We thank the Debris of the Anthropocene to Resources (DotA2) Lab at NTU for their support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Yao Wang, Yuliang Guo, Xiaoqing Pi, Yijie Wang & Xunchang Fei

  2. Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Mingliang Fang

  3. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Ziyang Lou

  4. College of Chemistry and Environmental Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China

    Hongping He

  5. Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute, Singapore, Singapore

    Yuliang Guo & Xunchang Fei

  6. Department of Environmental Engineering, School of Biology and the Environment, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China

    Ke Yin

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Contributions

Yao Wang and X.F. conceptualized the study. Yao Wang, M.F., Z.L., H.H., Y.G., X.P., Yijie Wang and K.Y. collected, analysed and illustrated the data. The manuscript was written by Yao Wang with revisions from all the authors.

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Correspondence to Ke Yin or Xunchang Fei.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Broghan Erland, Amaya Lobo and Max Krause for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–6, Tables 1–7 and Discussion.

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Wang, Y., Fang, M., Lou, Z. et al. Methane emissions from landfills differentially underestimated worldwide. Nat Sustain 7, 496–507 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01307-9

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