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Nature Climate Change (2024)
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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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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.
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Zichong Chen, Nicholas Balasus, Haipeng Lin & Daniel J. Jacob
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
Hannah Nesser
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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.
Correspondence to Zichong Chen.
The authors declare no competing interests.
Nature Climate Change thanks Shushi Peng and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Table 1.
Data for both panels of Fig. 1.
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. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01907-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01907-x
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