Time’s up! Who will lead us up Mt. Methane?

Two concrete steps we can take today to advance meaningfully in combating climate change.

The accelerated warming of the planet—and society’s inability to slow its advance—require a change in course and leadership on the part of both the public and private sectors.

Tackling the super pollutant methane, responsible for approximately 40% of global warming, can buy us more time as we develop the long-term low-carbon infrastructure and carbon removal technologies needed to stop and ultimately reverse climate change.

Methane causes 81x more warming than CO₂ but remains in the atmosphere for far less time, making its reduction particularly effective for short-term cooling. Tackling methane now could reduce warming by 0.5ºC by 2050—by comparison, the entire energy transition is only expected to contribute about 0.1ºC in the same timeframe.

Despite its impact, methane has received less than 4% of climate finance, showing how climate science focused on methane still struggles to break into policy-making and capital markets.

The world needs two things:

• A Binding Agreement: A commitment by state leaders to sign by the end of next year (2026) a definitive, mandatory agreement to cut methane emissions.

• An Advanced Market Commitment (AMC): The launch of a non-governmental “buyers’ club” to invest in projects tackling methane mitigation.

Both models have proven precedents we can emulate.

Seeing progress in these two areas by the end of this year could mark the most consequential outcomes of this decade—and of COP30 in Belém, Brazil.

Let’s dive in.

🏔️ A Binding Agreement on Methane

A binding agreement is a legal instrument between states that establishes enforceable obligations to deliver on a specified goal. Unlike voluntary pledges, binding agreements include clear timelines, measurable targets, and consequences for non-compliance.

A methane agreement could move quickly because, fortunately, we already have the playbook: the Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987.

That treaty phased out 99% of CFCs, restoring the ozone layer—which is now on track to fully recover by 2050. Its total climate benefit is estimated to equal 2.5ºC of avoided warming by 2100.

Just imagine where we would be today if we hadn’t come together back then.

“We already conquered the summit once when we banned CFCs under the Montreal Protocol; now we need to conquer it again for methane.”

— Durwood Zaelke, President & Founder of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD)

The journey began with the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer (1985), a voluntary framework signed by 28 countries. Two years later came the Montreal Protocol, a binding agreement that entered into force in 1989 with 46 initial signatories—which ultimately got ratified by every nation on Earth, becoming the only UN treaty with universal participation.

Methane needs a similar story.

The Global Methane Pledge, signed in 2021, and the targets established at COP28 in Dubai (2023) were important voluntary commitments but remain insufficient—only 45% of the oil & gas industry has signed on, and no enforcement mechanism exists.

It is time we move toward a definitive binding methane agreement signed by the end of 2026, ideally starting with commitments made by world leaders next month at COP30 in Belém. These commitments should begin independently—outside the slow machinery of centralized entities (e.g., UNFCCC)—just as the Montreal Protocol did.

Momentum is already building. At Climate Week New York City, investors representing €4.75 trillion in assets urged governments to uphold methane regulations “as adopted.” Leaders including President Emmanuel Macron (France), Prime Minister Mia Mottley (Barbados), and President Simina (Micronesia) called for mandatory methane mitigation. The Climate Vulnerable Forum, representing 74 countries and 1.8 billion people, echoed that call.

The yet-to-be-named protocol must advance quickly—and it’s up to us to ensure that it does.

And as it evolves, it should quickly move beyond oil & gas to other large sectors that require methane mitigation, including the super-emitting landfills.

💰 An Advanced Market Commitment for Methane

If the binding agreement represents regulated action backed by political leadership, then an Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) represents private sector and philanthropic leadership to catalyze investment. The two should advance in parallel to accelerate impact.

An AMC is a coalition of buyers—companies, financial institutions, and philanthropies—making a capital commitment that guarantees early demand for verified outcomes. It signals to innovators, developers, and investors: if you build the solutions, there will be a buyer on the other end.

The model is borrowed from the biotech industry, where it was used to accelerate vaccine development and ensure that life-saving solutions reached the market years earlier than they otherwise would have.

This model has already proven its catalytic power in driving capital towards projects that reduce or remove a different greenhouse gas—carbon. Examples include:

• LEAF Coalition—Mobilized over US$1.5 billion in guaranteed payments for forest conservation. Founding participants include Amazon, Salesforce, Unilever, Nestlé and the governments of the United States, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

• Frontier Climate—A coalition led by Stripe, Google, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey & Company, committing over US$1 billion to accelerate carbon removal technologies.

• Symbiosis Coalition—Backed by Google, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce, and McKinsey & Company, mobilizing capital for large-scale ecosystem restoration.

In total, agreements for carbon removal alone have surpassed US$10 billion in just 3-4 years, proving that when the challenge is well defined and governance is credible, capital moves—fast.

Now we need to direct that same ambition toward methane, and I would suggest even more aggressively!

A Methane AMC could establish a US$3 billion buyers’ coalition to guarantee verified methane reductions across the three largest emitting sectors, for example:

• US$1 billion for oil & gas—to incentivize leak detection, repair, tapping, capture, and destruction.

• US$1 billion for agriculture—to support innovations in enteric fermentation, rice cultivation, and manure management.

• US$1 billion for biowaste—to fund composting and anaerobic digestion infrastructure that replaces landfilling altogether.

The AMC would help to create price certainty and early demand across diverse methane sources—accelerating proven solutions while supporting innovation and regional inclusivity.

The coalition on the corporate side would, ideally, expand well beyond the Big Techs and include oil and gas, the food and beverage industries, financial services, industrials and beyond.

Methane is the emergency brake we can pull right now.

A binding agreement can drive top-down action for large methane leakers to improve efficiency, defined as “methane intensity,” while an AMC can unlock critical funding for low-hanging fruit and breakthrough innovations.

Together, they can get us up Mt. Methane—and fast.

I’d like to acknowledge some of the people who are incredibly dedicated to solving the methane challenge and who are doing very important work: Durwood Zaelke and the team at IGSD, Ilissa Ocko and the team at Spark Climate Solutions, Tom Frankiewicz and Rose Wang at RMI, Carolina Urmeneta at Global Methane Hub, Jason Grillo (SPECTRA AMC), Monica Miller Prabhu at Methane Mitigation Industries Council (MMIC), Janek Vähk at Zero Waste Europe Dominic Hogg, Caio Teves Inácio, Antonio Storel, Fernando Carvalho Oliveira among many others. Thank you.