Jorgen Thomsen, Director, Climate Solutions, reflects on the importance of collective action to equitably address climate change.
Some of the most exciting moments in philanthropy happen when funders use their collective power to advance major climate solutions. It happened when philanthropy stepped up in support of the Kigali Agreement, the landmark amendment to the Montreal Protocol that calls for a reduction of dangerous hydrofluorocarbon emissions globally by 80 percent by the year 2045. By establishing the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program, 18 funders committed $52 million to help developing countries transition to energy-efficient, climate-friendly, and affordable cooling solutions.
It happened again during the last few months when 23 climate funders, including MacArthur, came together to commit more than $300 million to reduce methane emissions globally. This includes supporting the Global Methane Pledge to reduce global methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050, a diplomatic effort spearheaded by the United States and the European Union.
Reducing methane emissions is the single most cost-effective and impactful opportunity to address the climate crisis at scale. Methane is 80 times more potent at warming than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. In the past decade, global methane emissions have risen at a rate faster than at any time in the last 30 years. At least 25 percent of today’s warming is driven by methane from human actions, with the fossil fuel industry, agriculture, and landfills being the heaviest emitters.
The recent Global Methane Assessment (from the Climate and Clean Air Coalition), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent assessment, reinforce the urgent need to address methane emissions. Rapid methane reductions can reduce warming by as much as 0.3°C by the 2040s and more than 0.5°C by 2100. This comes in addition to the many health benefits gained from reducing emissions of methane’s co-pollutants, including reduced rates of death, asthma, low birth weight, and other negative outcomes.
MacArthur has been driving methane reduction efforts for several years by supporting the work of groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, Clean Air Task Force, Earthworks, and others. Our grantees and partners work at both the regulatory and enforcement levels, to make this invisible threat visible, and at national and international levels, to restrict these dangerous emissions.
What really motivates us, and should motivate all of us, is how methane further exacerbates inequality caused by the climate crisis and disproportionately harms the most vulnerable among us.
We already know that the level to which communities are prepared to respond to and recover from this crisis varies dramatically. The climate impacts made worse by methane emissions are more likely to impact people facing economic and nutritional insecurity, laborers and agriculture workers, the elderly, and the sick. That is why reducing methane pollution is environmental justice.
Directly reducing methane emissions is especially crucial for frontline communities that suffer the worst impacts of methane pollution and climate change. Medical research and modeling show that annually, worldwide, methane reduction could help avoid more than 400,000 premature deaths, 624,000 asthma and respiratory illness-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations, and 59 billion lost work hours due to heat exposure.
In the United States, the Clean Air Task Force found more than one million Black Americans live within a half-mile of oil and methane gas wells, processing, transmission, and storage facilities. And 6.7 million live in counties with refineries, potentially exposing them to an elevated risk of cancer due to toxic air emissions.
For all these reasons and more, the burden of meeting the Global Methane Pledge must be equitable. The 30 percent target set by this pledge is global, not within any individual country’s borders. That means the biggest emitters, including the United States, have a responsibility to set a high standard of ambition and do more to pull their weight.
As John Palfrey, MacArthur’s President, said during the launch of the Global Methane Pledge, “This demands government, the private sector, and philanthropy act ambitiously, just as the nations joining this global pledge have signaled they will do.”
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