European Commission presents Roadmap on Methane Emissions (EU Strategic Plan)

The Commission presented a Roadmap for the expected EU Strategy on Methane Emissions on 8 July. A four-week public consultation on the Roadmap is open for feedback until 5 August. The roadmap highlights the key actions of the upcoming EU Methane Emissions Strategy, which will cover agriculture, energy and waste sectors.

The strategy is aimed at tackling methane emissions and exploring potential synergies between the covered sectors. For the energy sector, improving actual measurement, reporting and verification of emissions is needed. For agriculture, accurate monitoring, verifying and reporting is more challenging, and require clear methodologies to capture any mitigation efforts correctly. Finally, for the waste sector, the main source of methane emissions are uncontrolled emissions of landfill gas in landfill sites.

The roadmap also highlights the need to achieve better measurement and reporting of EU methane emissions at private and sectoral entity level (ahead of designing new policies to curb emissions). It will also consider sector-specific actions to reduce emissions, to contribute to cleaner air and to improve the collection of methane in agriculture and waste for potential use as a source of energy.

The Commission is expected to come forward with a Strategy for Methane Emissions by the end of the third quarter of 2020.