Reviewed by Frances BriggsJul 30 2025
A new satellite technique can accurately measure methane from landfills worldwide, revealing that open dumps emit nearly five times more than engineered sites.
Image Credit: Jenya Smyk/Shutterstock.com
Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, has around 84 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over 20 years. Solid waste in landfills is now one of the most significant human sources of global methane production, being the third biggest producer.
But tracking these emissions is challenging, and ground-based methods are often sparse, costly, and limited in scope.
But now researchers have developed a satellite-based approach that offers a clearer, more comprehensive view. Using five years of high-resolution data, both 30-metre spatial and 10-nanometre spectral, they tracked methane from 102 high-emitting landfills across various climates and waste management setups.
Their findings, published in Nature Climate Change, show that uncontained, open landfills emit, on average, 4.8 times more methane than engineered sanitary landfills. When benchmarked against the EU’s widely used Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR v8.0), methane emissions from open dumps were found to be underestimated by a factor of 5.3.
Satellite remote sensing delivers consistent, high-resolution global quantification that traditional methods can't match. Our tool boosts both accuracy and coverage, offering a new means of global methane surveillance, critical for informing international mitigation policies.
Tianhai Cheng, Study Corresponding Author and Researcher, Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), Chinese Academy of Sciences
To confirm the method’s accuracy, satellite results were compared to aerial data validated by on-the-ground observations, and there was strong agreement between the two.
The research also explored the impact of upgrading landfill practices. Converting open dumps to engineered landfills and diverting organic waste to composting or biodigestion could reduce landfill methane emissions by 80 %, a mitigation potential of up to 760 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.
Our work provides a basis for correcting these biases in current inventories.
Haoran Tong, Study First Author and PhD Candidate, Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), Chinese Academy of Sciences
Considering their findings, the researchers are calling for increased international efforts to improve landfill infrastructure and waste management, as well as the creation of a global satellite data-sharing platform to ensure equitable access to greenhouse gas mitigation information, particularly for resource-limited countries.
Journal Reference:
Tong, H., et al. (2025). Reduction of methane emissions through improved landfill management. Nature Climate Change. doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02391-1.