Antalya, 12 November 2026 – As the world gathers for crucial climate negotiations, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) announced that nations and oil and gas operators have delivered total cuts in methane emissions equivalent to taking 26 million cars off the road for a year.
Meeting at the UNEP International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) ministerial, co-hosted by Canada and the European Union during COP31, ministers also heard that other nations are promising to ramp up action, and the oil and gas industry is increasingly committing to methane transparency.
“With the world on course to exceed 1.5°C of warming, we must limit how high temperatures rise and how long they stay high, and then bring them down,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP. “Methane is the second largest contributor to global heating behind carbon dioxide, but it leaves the atmosphere quickly, so cutting its emissions is our emergency brake to slow warming. The work of IMEO shows that such reductions are not only possible but taking place now.”
Since June, IMEO’s Methane Alert and Response system (MARS) – which uses satellites, AI and scientific expertise to detect major methane plumes and alert nations and operators – has confirmed the mitigation of five new major methane sources, bringing the total addressed to 46 across 13 countries.
The five new cases – across Canada, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Mexico – represent 125,000 tonnes of methane addressed, with a climate impact equal to nearly 2.5 million cars driven for a year. These new cases bring the total amount of methane emissions that have been addressed via MARS up to the equivalent of taking 26 million cars off the road for a year.
Responses growing
In June 2026, the UN Secretary-General released his Call to Action on Methane, setting out nine priority actions across the fossil fuel, waste and agriculture sectors to accelerate emissions reductions by 2030, in line with the Global Methane Pledge to cut 30 per cent off methane emissions by 2030.
In support of the call, UNEP expanded support to help countries achieve an 80 per cent response rate to major emission alerts by 2030. Since June, Azerbaijan, Canada, Iraq and Libya have reached this benchmark, bringing the total to 13 countries, including nine that have achieved a 100 per cent response rate.
Accelerating transparency
Meanwhile, UNEP’s flagship private sector methane reporting framework, the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, has now grown to 164 companies, representing 43 per cent of global oil and gas production – adding ten companies in 2026 alone.
The partnership has put one-third of global production on track for its Gold Standard, indicating measurement-based emissions reporting and mitigation – with the share of global production at OGMP 2.0’s highest data quality doubling year over year.
This rapid shift to measurement-based methane transparency and mitigation in the sector is essential to establishing a credible picture of emissions and helping investors, markets and regulators assess progress towards mitigation.
UNEP is also expanding its methane reductions work on coal and steel while the industry decarbonises. UNEP analysis indicates roughly half of methane from metallurgical (met) coal used in steel production could be mitigated through measures equal to roughly one per cent the price of steel.
New data from UNEP’s Coal Methane Database – which covers the 250 largest met coal producing mines and roughly half of global met coal production – finds that 1.4 million tonnes of methane could be mitigated from these sources.
Reducing these emissions is essential for rapidly addressing the emissions intensity of steel production as the sector pursues longer-term decarbonization.
