Methane emissions from fossil fuels stayed near record highs in 2025, with no sign of decline despite proven, low-cost ways to reduce them, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Monday.

 “Methane emissions from the energy sector plateaued near record highs,” the IEA found in its annual Global Methane Tracker. “There is still no sign that methane emissions from fossil fuel operations are falling, despite well-known and proven mitigation pathways.” 

The findings land halfway towards the 2030 deadline for cutting global methane emissions by 30%, a target that 159 countries and the European Union (EU) set under the Global Methane Pledge. A UN assessment released at COP30 found nations were on course to deliver less than a third of that.

Methane is responsible for nearly 30% of the rise in global average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. With an atmospheric lifespan of around 12 years, against centuries for carbon dioxide, cutting it is one of the fastest available levers on near-term warming, often described as the climate “hand brake”.

More than half of global oil and gas output is now covered by company pledges to near-zero methane emissions, up from less than 20% in 2021. But the report found a “large implementation gap” between commitments and outcomes.

“Countries and companies have raised their ambitions on methane, moving the issue higher up the policy agenda,” said Tim Gould, the IEA’s chief energy economist, who presented the findings at a high-level event in Paris convened by France’s G7 presidency.

“However, setting reduction targets is only a first step, and it is important to ensure they are backed up by policies, implementation plans and real actions.”

Fossil fuel production drives methane

Oil, gas and coal production reached record levels in 2025, the IEA found. 

While the report found the global average upstream methane intensity of oil and gas production has fallen by around 10% since 2019, the IEA estimates total methane emissions from fossil fuel activities remain at 124 million tonnes a year, equivalent to the annual emissions of around three billion cars.

Methane is the main component of natural gas and is emitted across the fossil fuel supply chain: vented from equipment by design, flared incompletely, leaked from valves, pipelines and storage tanks, or released from coal mine ventilation shafts, inextricably tying methane emissions levels to oil, gas and coal production. 

Oil is its largest source, releasing the equivalent of around two-thirds of the EU’s annual gas imports. Coal follows closely, then natural gas, the report found. A further 20 million tonnes comes from the incomplete burning of wood, charcoal and other traditional fuels in developing economies, principally used for cooking.

Around 70% of methane emissions from fossil fuel operations could be cut using existing technology, the IEA said, with more than 35 million tonnes avoidable at no net cost as the price of gas offsets the investment needed to capture it. 

“This is not only a climate issue,” Gould said. “There are also major energy security benefits that can come from tackling methane and flaring, especially at a time when the world is urgently looking for additional supply amid the current crisis.”

European Union energy chief Dan Jorgensen, speaking at the G7, added that capturing the gas being lost would significantly ease pressure on global markets.

“We could have three times more gas on the market if we eliminated this waste,” Jorgensen said. “This shows that methane abatement and energy security are not competing priorities.”

“Methane is the single fastest lever we have to limit near-term warming. We can no longer wait to pull this lever.”

Pledges expand, emissions don’t

The push for methane action accelerated at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, where the United States, the EU and more than 100 other countries launched the Global Methane Pledge. The pact now covers 159 countries and nearly three-quarters of global oil and gas production.

Five years on, COP26 president Alok Sharma, who guided the methane pledge across the line, said action is not living up to the scale required to abate the climate crisis.

“Things are looking much bleaker than they were,” Sharma told a high-level meeting at IEA headquarters on Friday. “We breached 1.5°C last year and the year before, temporarily, and frankly, the prognosis is not good.”

With no decline in fossil fuel emissions globally in 2025, atmospheric methane concentrations continued to rise. The IEA estimates that more than 85 million tonnes of fossil-fuel methane in 2025 came from the 10 biggest emitters: China, US, Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan, India, Venezuela, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Iraq. Together, they account for around 70% of global fossil fuel methane emissions.

The methane intensity of oil and gas production, or emissions per unit of energy delivered, varies widely, with the best performers scoring more than 100 times better than the worst, according to IEA data.

Norway has the lowest upstream intensity in the world, the IEA found, achieved through a national ban on non-emergency flaring and a tax on venting and flaring introduced in 2015. Producers in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, also perform relatively well, according to the report.

Turkmenistan and Venezuela have by far the highest intensities, the result of ageing Soviet-era and decrepit state-run infrastructure operating with little regulatory oversight.

Independent analysis from the Stop Methane Project at UCLA found Turkmenistan dominated the list of the 25 worst-emitting facilities globally in 2025, emitting a “mind-boggling” amount of methane experts say could be easily contained.

If every country matched Norway’s methane emissions intensity, global oil and gas methane emissions would fall by more than 90%, the IEA found.

“Action on methane is not a fight of any single actor and nobody can win it alone,” French environment minister Monique Barbut said at the Paris event. “We must be clear: the energy sector offers today the fastest and often the most cost-effective reductions.”

COP presidents press for action

The IEA report was previewed at a high-level event at the agency’s Paris headquarters last week, where the COP31 presidency, made up of Turkey and Australia, set out priorities for the November summit in Antalya.

Laurent Fabius, the former French prime minister who shepherded the Paris Agreement at COP21, said methane should be a central focus in Turkey, where the UN Environment Programme is expected to release its annual Eye on Methane report.

Last year’s edition, launched at COP30 in Belém, found current national commitments would cut global methane emissions by just 8% below 2020 levels by 2030, under a quarter of the pledge target.

“Methane is the faster way of trying to diminish global warming,” Fabius said. “Progress has been made. Pledges do exist, efficient techniques too, but we know that it is not enough. Methane should be one of the stars of COP31.”

Sharma also pressed the point on finance, which he said was still falling far short of what was needed. Global clean energy investment reached a record €2.3 trillion last year, but a third of what was needed by 2030.

Only 10% had gone to hard-to-abate sectors, and more than 80% to East Asia, Europe and the United States. Excluding China, developing countries representing 30 to 35% of global emissions were not getting the finance they need, he said.

“We’re still nowhere near the scale that we should be … If you want to transition away from fossil fuels, you need to provide the finance for people to do that,” Sharma said. “We need to make sure there’s grant support to help developing nations look at their regulatory regimes.”

“There will be some people who will say, and they’ve said it in the past, that the COPs are not the place this nitty gritty discussion on finance. That’s wrong. That is totally wrong,” Sharma said. “It is absolutely the place where we ought to be having discussion about these details on finance.”

Simon Stiell, the UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, framed the energy crisis triggered by the war in the Middle East as an argument for accelerating the transition itself, which would in turn cut methane at source by reducing demand for the fossil fuels that produce it.

“Those who’ve fought to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels are inadvertently supercharging the global renewables boom,” Stiell said. “This latest fossil fuel cost crisis has made the economic logic of renewables impossible to ignore.”

“Renewables offer safer, cheaper, cleaner energy that can’t be held captive by narrow shipping straits, or global conflicts,” Stiell said, adding that “slashing methane” should be one of the most urgent priorities of COP31 for its potential to deliver “fast climate benefits while saving money.”

Clean cooking and the bioenergy gap

Around 18 million tonnes of methane emissions in 2025 came from the roughly 2 billion people worldwide who cook on open fires or simple stoves burning wood, charcoal and agricultural residues, with serious consequences for human health and the environment.

Nearly half of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, where four in five households have no access to clean cooking technology, according to data released at the IMF Spring Meetings.

The smoke produced exposes mostly women and children to particulate matter and carbon monoxide, driving severe respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Cooking with solid fuels is linked to 815,000 premature deaths a year globally, and household air pollution from these fuels remains one of the leading environmental health risks worldwide.

“Expanding access to clean cooking solutions, including liquefied petroleum gas, electricity, improved biomass stoves and clean biofuels, offers further scope to cut methane emissions while delivering substantial health, gender and economic benefits in communities most affected by traditional biomass use,” the report said.

Clean cooking is one of the COP31 presidency’s stated priorities, alongside electrification, zero waste and finance, representatives of the presidency from Turkey and Australia said.

“Electrification, clean cooking, zero waste and finance, these are things that we can all gather around,” said Australia’s ambassador Stephen Jones, deputising for the country’s COP31 negotiations president.

Jones said the climate transition and the response to the energy crisis were the same fight.

“The clean energy solution is the solution to the energy crisis that we are now engaged in,” he said. “Paris is working. But we have to work faster and put more effort in.”

Image Credits: Clean Air Task Force , IEA, IEA .