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Current and future methane emissions from boreal-Arctic wetlands and lakes

Nature Climate Change volume 15, pages 986–991 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Methane emissions from the boreal-Arctic region are likely to increase due to warming and permafrost thaw, but the magnitude of increase is unconstrained. Here we show that distinguishing several wetland and lake classes improves our understanding of current and future methane emissions. Our estimate of net annual methane emission (1988–2019) was 34 (95% CI: 25–43) Tg CH4 yr−1, dominated by five wetland (26 Tg CH4 yr−1) and seven lake (5.7 Tg CH4 yr−1) classes. Our estimate was lower than previous estimates due to explicit characterization of low methane-emitting wetland and lake classes, for example, permafrost bogs, bogs, large lakes and glacial lakes. To reduce uncertainty further, improved wetland maps and further measurements of wetland winter emissions and lake ebullition are needed. Methane emissions were estimated to increase by ~31% under a moderate warming scenario (SSP2-4.5 by 2100), driven primarily by warming rather than permafrost thaw.

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Fig. 1: Current (1988–2019) boreal-Arctic terrestrial and inland water ecosystem CH4 emissions, areas and uncertainties.
Fig. 2: Future wetland and lake CH4 emissions and drivers.
Fig. 3: Summary of sources of uncertainty and highest model sensitivity for current CH4 emissions from natural ecosystems in the boreal-Arctic region.

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Data availability

Gridded maps of annual methane emissions from the boreal-Arctic region produced from this study are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14991411 (ref. 58). The BAWLD-CH4 flux dataset is available for download from the Arctic Data Center via https://doi.org/10.18739/A27H1DN5S (ref. 59). The companion BAWLD land-cover spatial dataset is also available at the Arctic Data Center via https://doi.org/10.18739/A2C824F9X (ref. 60). UpCH4 emissions and WAD2m wetland products are available via DOE ORNL DAAC (UpCH4, https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2253; ref. 61) and Zenodo (WAD2M, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5553187; ref. 62). Emissions products from Peltola and colleagues47 (RF-PEATMAP, RF-GLWD) are available from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2560163 (ref. 63). CarbonTracker CT-CH4-2023 results are provided by NOAA GML via https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/carbontracker-ch4/. The GCP-BU product is available on reasonable request from Z.Z. (yuisheng@gmail.com). CMIP6 future temperature scenarios can be downloaded from https://www.worldclim.org/. Background political boundaries used in maps are from ref. 64.

Code availability

Code to calculate annual emissions can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15636336 (ref. 65) and https://github.com/kenziekuhn4/bawldCH4_scaling (ref. 66).

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grant (grant no. RGPIN-2016-04688 to D.O and M.A.K), and the Campus Alberta Innovates Program (D.O. and M.A.K). We also acknowledge funding by the Northern Scientific Training Program, University of Alberta and UAlberta North, Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship; the W. Garfield Weston Foundation; NSF award nos. 2109429 (M.A.K.) and NNA 2022561 (K.W.A); the TED Audacious Project (K.A.A. and J.D.W.); the ERC (grant no. H2020 725546 to D.B.); Formas (grant no. 2018-01794 to D.B.); the Swedish VR grant nos. 2022-03841 (to D.B.) and 2022-04839 (to G.H.); ESA AMPAC-Net (G.G. and G.H.); the EU Horizon ILLUQ project (grant no. 773421 to G.H.); COMPASS-FME, a multi-institutional project supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research as part of the Environmental System Science Program (A.M.,E.F.-C); an NSF Biology Integration Institutes Program Award (no. 2022070 to R.K.V.); the DOE Genomic Sciences program (grant no. DE-SC0023456 to R.K.V.); and an NOAA cooperative agreement (grant no. NA22OAR4320151 to L.B. and Y.O.). The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for the DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract no. DE-AC05-76RL01830 (A.M. and E.F.-C.). The statements, findings, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NOAA or the US Department of Commerce.

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Author notes

  1. McKenzie Kuhn

    Present address: Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

    McKenzie Kuhn & David Olefeldt

  2. Woodwell Climate Research Center, Falmouth, MA, USA

    Kyle A. Arndt & Jennifer D. Watts

  3. Department of Thematic Studies—Environmental Change, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    David Bastviken

  4. Global Monitoring Laboratory, NOAA, Boulder, CO, USA

    Lori Bruhwiler & Youmi Oh

  5. Dept of Geological Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Patrick Crill & Ruth K. Varner

  6. Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Patrick Crill & Gustaf Hugelius

  7. Department of Earth System and Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Tonya DelSontro

  8. Earth System Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Etienne Fluet-Chouinard

  9. Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Permafrost Research Section, Potsdam, Germany

    Guido Grosse & Claire C. Treat

  10. Institute of Geosciences, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Guido Grosse

  11. Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Mikael Hovemyr & Gustaf Hugelius

  12. Marine Science Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Sally MacIntyre

  13. Biological Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Avni Malhotra

  14. Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA

    A. David McGuire

  15. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Youmi Oh

  16. Spark Climate Solutions, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Benjamin Poulter

  17. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Merritt R. Turetsky

  18. Department of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA

    Ruth K. Varner

  19. Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA

    Ruth K. Varner

  20. Water and Environmental Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA

    Katey M. Walter Anthony

  21. Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Zhen Zhang

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Contributions

M.A.K and D.O. conceived of the work. M.A.K. led the data analysis with contributions from D.O. M.A.K led the interpretation of data with contributions from D.O., K.A.A, D.B., L.B., P.C., T.D., E.F.C., G.G., M.H., G.H., S.M., A.M., A.D.M., Y.O., B.P., C.C.T., M.R.T., R.K.V., K.M.W., J.D.W. and Z.Z. M.A.K wrote the manuscript, and D.O., K.A.A, D.B., L.B., P.C., T.D., E.F.C., G.G., G.H., S.M., A.M., A.D.M., Y.O., B.P., C.C.T., M.R.T., R.K.V., K.M.W., J.D.W. and Z.Z edited it.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to McKenzie Kuhn.

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Nat. Clim. Chang. thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Table 1 Comparison of wetland extent, flux, and emissions from recent emission products from the boreal tundra biomes
Full size table

Extended Data Fig. 1 Modelled current annual (1988–2019) CH4 emissions.

Annual emissions for lakes are shown on panel a, while annual emissions for wetlands are shown on panel b.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Comparisons of net annual wetland emissions across biomes.

RF-PEATMAP and RF-GLWD fluxes & emissions are based on random-forest upscaling of boreal-Arctic eddy covariance data48 (for years 2013 & 2014). The UpCH4 emissions product uses the WAD2M wetland map and a global eddy covariance random forest model (2000-2017)7. GCP-BU is the Global Carbon Project Bottom-Up ensemble model (2000-2017)3, which also uses the WAD2M wetland map. CT-CH4-2023 is NOAA’s CarbonTracker-CH4-2023 inversion model11 (long-term 1997-2021 average; see Methods for model details). Emissions from this study (BAWLD) only include wetland emissions.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs 1–13 and captions for Supplementary Tables 1–13.

Supplementary Data 1–13

Excel sheet containing Supplementary Tables 1–13, each on an individual sheet.

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Kuhn, M., Olefeldt, D., Arndt, K.A. et al. Current and future methane emissions from boreal-Arctic wetlands and lakes. Nat. Clim. Chang. 15, 986–991 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02413-y

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