Ahead of COP31, Satellites Reveal Methane Pouring From Turkey's Landfills
Turkey hosts the COP31 climate summit in Antalya from November 9 to 20 and has made methane reduction a priority for the gathering. But satellite observations reveal that the country's landfills are releasing large quantities of methane — Turkey is the world's fifth-biggest emitter of methane from solid waste, behind China, the United States, Russia and Brazil, according to data from non-profit emissions tracker Climate TRACE.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) analysed public data from the Carbon Mapper non-profit, collected by the Tanager-1 satellite between January 2025 and the end of May 2026. The analysis identified 70 plumes from Turkey's 10 highest-emitting waste sites, where average detected rates ranged from 841 kilograms to 7.4 metric tons an hour. The landfill west of Istanbul near Seymen showed an average detected rate of about 7.4 tons an hour — just below the highest-emitting landfill on a global list from 2025.
Turkey's Environment Ministry said in response that the data were not from continuous measurements and could not be used to measure annual emissions at the Seymen landfill. ISTAC official Aysen Erdincler disputed whether the satellite observations were representative, saying emissions typically ranged between 4 and 6 tons per hour, while a satellite reading of 12 tons per hour on one day had raised the average.
Methane emissions from waste in Turkey rose nearly 25 percent in the decade to 2024, compared with a global rise of 6.5 percent over the same period, according to World Bank data based on the European Commission's EDGAR emissions database. Turkey's waste emissions have remained around 21 million tons of CO2 equivalent annually since 2020. Turkey is not listed among the participants in the Global Methane Pledge.
Source: Reuters
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：甲烷气体火炬燃烧。A methane gas flare. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
