Tracking Methane Emissions by Satellite : A New World Bank Database andCase Study forIrrigated Rice Production

Atmospheric methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has accounted for 23 percent ofradiative forcing in the lower atmosphere since 1750. Since methane has a much shorter atmospheric duration than carbondioxide and other greenhouse gases, it provides a critical opportunity for near-term atmospheric greenhouse gasreduction. Thus, 122 countries have joined the recently launched Global Methane Pledge to reduce methane emissionsat least 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030. Unfortunately, the Pledge confronts a serious information problem at theoutset: the near-total absence of directly measured data for problem diagnosis, program design, and performanceassessment. At present, priority areas for emissions reduction are identified with spatially formatted“bottom-up” emissions inventories, such as the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, which combinessectoral activity data with broadly calibrated emissions factors from engineering studies. This paper addresses theinformation problem by introducing a new World Bank database of monthly atmospheric methane concentrations, calculatedfor a high-resolution spatial grid from data provided by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite platform. Itillustrates the potential utility of the database with a global study of methane emissions from irrigated riceproduction, which accounts for about 10 percent of agricultural methane emissions. A comparative analysissuggests that the Sentinel-5P data supplement the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research data with morefine-grained spatial information, which may support local programs to track, verify, and reward adoption ofmethane-reducing rice production techniques. If this approach proves valuable for irrigated rice production, itseems likely to work for other methane sources as well.