A 130-year global inventory of methane emissions from livestock: trends, patterns, and drivers

Livestock contributes approximately one-third of global anthropogenic methane (CH4) emissions. Quantifying the spatial and temporal variations of these emissions is crucial for climate change mitigation. Although country-level information is reported regularly through national inventories and global databases, spatially-explicit quantification of century-long dynamics of CH4 emissions from livestock has been poorly investigated. Using the Tier 2 method adopted from the 2019 Refinement to 2006 IPCC guidelines, we estimated CH4 emissions from global livestock at a spatial resolution of 0.083° (~ 9 km at the equator) during the period 1890−2019. We find that global CH4 emissions from livestock increased from 31.8 [26.5−37.1] (mean [minimum−maximum of 95% confidence interval) Tg CH4 yr-1 in 1890 to 131.7 [109.6−153.7] Tg CH4 yr-1 in 2019, a fourfold increase in the past 130 years. The growth in global CH4 emissions mostly occurred after 1950 and was mainly attributed to the cattle sector. O...