The global emissions of methaneone of the main gases of greenhouse effectgrew in 2020, despite the economic slowdown due to the coronavirus lockdowns, something that was probably due to the known effect of large wetlands in Africa, Canada and Russia.
This is the conclusion of study of a team of scientists from the University of Leeds who used the data from the Sentinel-5P satellite, explained this Thursday in a statement the European Space Agency (ESA), responsible for the European Earth observation program Copernicus.
From the information collected by Sentinel-5P, the scientists verified that the satellite measurements showed the same increase in methane that had been observed on the surface.
Some observations that had shown that in 2020 there was the largest annual increase since the 1980s, and this despite the fact that during that year economic activity was reduced by the pandemic. The emissions record was broken again in 2021.
Beyond that finding, the experts identified regions where large increases occurred in 2020, including South Sudan and Uganda in central Africa and southern areas in Canada and Russia.
During 2019, emissions related to large amounts of precipitation in wetlands in South Sudan had been found to have accounted for more than a quarter of global emissions growth in that exercise.
Those positive rainfall anomalies in South Sudan and Uganda continued in 2020. In addition to heavy rainfall, a lot of water was released from dams on Lake Victoria, increasing the flow of water into the White Nile that feeds wetlands in Uganda and Sudan. from the south.
Wetlands could be the dominant factor in explaining why there were large concentrations of methane on South Sudan in 2020.
