UN Report Expands Methane Focus to Agriculture, Waste

The UN Secretary-General’s Call to Action on Methane, released this summer, argues that meeting global methane reduction goals depends on more than fixing oil and gas leaks. Agriculture is the single largest source of human-caused methane emissions worldwide, responsible for approximately 42% of the total, while waste contributes another 20%. Together, those two sectors account for close to two-thirds of methane emissions outside the fossil fuel industry, and the report devotes as much attention to fixing them as it does to flaring and leaks.

Agriculture Remains the Largest Source

Rather than calling for less food production, the focus is on producing food more efficiently: better livestock nutrition and breeding, improved manure management, climate-resilient rice cultivation, wider agricultural extension services, and less food loss across supply chains. Real examples back that case. In India, a national dairy support project working with more than three million smallholders lifted milk production by 20% while cutting methane emissions 14%. In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, a climate-smart rice program covering more than a million farmers cut production costs by roughly 22%, raised profits about 40%, and reduced water pumping by 40%, alongside the same manure-to-biogas logic now being applied on dairy farms elsewhere. These kinds of measures could be implemented at a total annual cost of just $2.5 billion while cutting 17 million tonnes of methane by 2030, less than 3% of what governments currently spend on agricultural subsidies.

Food Waste Links Agriculture and Waste Policy

Food waste is treated as a shared problem between farms and cities. Roughly one billion tonnes of food are wasted annually at the retail and consumer level alone, with more lost earlier in production and distribution. Once that organic material reaches a landfill, it keeps generating methane for decades. It calls for governments to invest in cold-chain infrastructure, improve storage and logistics, and expand food recovery programs, the same instinct behind state-level programs already diverting millions of pounds of edible food from landfills.

Cities Face Growing Waste Management Challenges

The waste sector recommendations center on modernizing municipal infrastructure. The world produces more than two billion tonnes of municipal waste annually, a figure expected to nearly double by 2050 as urban populations grow. Today, roughly 23% of that waste goes uncollected and 33% is openly dumped, figures that climb sharply in lower-income countries. Priorities here include phasing out open dumping, expanding sanitary landfills, capturing landfill gas, scaling up anaerobic digestion, separating organic waste from other municipal streams, and investing in composting, treating organic waste as a resource rather than a disposal problem. Done well, these measures can cut methane, improve public health, lower fire risk, and generate renewable energy from captured landfill gas all at once.

Financing remains the constraint tying all three sectors together. The report estimates implementing technical methane measures across fossil fuels, agriculture, and waste would cost roughly $127 billion annually by 2030, well above current investment levels, even as it argues the avoided health costs and productivity gains would be worth far more. For sustainability leaders, the throughline is that methane is becoming less of a sector-specific problem and more of a cross-functional one, touching energy systems, food production, waste management, infrastructure planning, and environmental reporting all at once.