Methane Pledge Signed by 159 Nations in 2021. Emissions Are Up 3.5% Since, Not Down.

The Pledge Isn't Working

In 2021, at COP26, the United States and the European Union rounded up 159 countries to sign the Global Methane Pledge. The deal: cut methane emissions 30% below 2020 levels by 2030. Those countries represent about 45% of global human-caused methane output, according to OilPrice.com.

Five years in, the numbers are going the wrong direction.

Climate Analytics, a climate policy research institute, reports that average global anthropogenic methane emissions rose from 317 million tonnes in 2020, the pledge's baseline year, to 328 million tonnes in 2023. That's a 3.5% increase. To still hit the pledge's target, emissions now need to fall 32% from current levels in the next four years. That's a steeper climb than the original goal because the world spent the last five years moving backward instead of forward.

Separately, the International Energy Agency's Global Methane Tracker puts energy-sector methane emissions alone above 120 million tonnes annually, a figure that has stayed flat despite record oil, gas, and coal production, according to OilPrice.com. Abandoned wells and mines added roughly 8 million tonnes in 2024 by themselves.

Nobody's Really Checking

The structural problem is this: the pledge is voluntary with no enforcement mechanism. Countries self-report, and the IEA says actual energy-related methane emissions run about 80% higher than what governments report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Some regions, like Europe, measure and report accurately. Others don't measure much at all.

Turkmenistan is the poster child. A 2023 Guardian assessment, cited by OilPrice.com, found the country running "super-emitter" leaks from single valves and pipelines that outpaced the emissions of an entire coal-fired power plant. The United States, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela round out the list of the world's worst methane emitters from unplugged fossil fuel operations, per that same reporting.

None of those governments face penalties for missing the pledge. It's a handshake agreement, and the numbers show what handshake agreements without teeth tend to produce.

Technology Is Outrunning Diplomacy

While the pledge stalls, satellite tech is making it a lot harder to hide a leak. Google and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced a new AI model called MAPL-EMIT on September 9, 2026, trained on 3.6 million simulated methane plumes. According to Google's research blog, it detects 50% more plumes than human experts and has already flagged more than 23,000 additional emission sources worldwide, including 24 of the world's 25 largest-emitting landfills. Google released the plume database publicly on Earth Engine.

Private capital is moving too. Google announced on September 10 that it signed a deal to buy 1 million carbon credits over four years from Mitti Labs, a startup helping 70,000 smallholder farmers in India switch rice paddies to alternate wetting-and-drying instead of continuous flooding, according to ESG Today. Rice farming accounts for roughly 12% of global methane emissions. Mitti Labs says the practice cuts methane by half and irrigation water use by 40% without hurting yield. It's Google's largest superpollutant deal to date, part of a $50 million commitment the company made through 2030.

That's a company voluntarily funding leak fixes and verification in a way that 159 governments haven't managed to enforce among themselves.

Nature Isn't Waiting Either

There's also a wild card no pledge can regulate: permafrost. A study published August 6 in the journal Science, led by University of Edinburgh professor Paul Palmer, found methane emissions from Siberia rose 5% per year between 2010 and 2023, adding about 13.2 million tons annually. Western Siberia is getting wetter and releasing methane through microbial activity in thawing soil. Eastern Siberia is getting drier and burning more, releasing methane through wildfires. Palmer told Live Science the scale of the increase "is surprising," even though scientists expected some rise. Siberia is only about 5% of global methane output today, but it's one of the fastest-growing natural sources on the planet, and no international pledge covers permafrost thaw.

The Politics Around It

UN climate chief Simon Stiell told the European Parliament's environment committee on a recent Thursday that climate change is now "a continent-wide economic security emergency," citing a study that put this summer's extreme weather cost to Europe at €180 billion. He argued methane cuts, food security, and urban resilience should be Europe's priorities heading into COP31 in Türkiye later this year. He also insisted climate shouldn't be a partisan football, which is itself a political argument dressed as a neutral one, since Stiell runs the UN body tasked with pushing these agreements forward. His €180 billion figure comes from a single study he cited and hasn't been independently verified here.

Whether COP31 produces anything beyond another round of pledges, or whether satellite data and corporate deals end up doing more of the actual leak-plugging than the diplomats, is the open question heading into the fall.