Naveena Sadasivam, Grist

Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant

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On a blustery day in early March, the who’s who of methane research gathered at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California. Dozens of people crammed into a NASA mission control center. Others watched from cars pulled alongside roads just outside the sprawling facility. Many more followed a livestream. They came from across the country to witness the launch of an oven-sized satellite capable of detecting the potent planet-warming gas from space.

The amount of methane, the primary component in natural gas, in the atmosphere has been rising steadily over the last few decades, reaching nearly three times as much as preindustrial times. About a third of methane emissions in the United States occur during the extraction of fossil fuels as the gas seeps from wellheads, pipelines, and other equipment. The rest come from agricultural operations, landfills, coal mining, and other sources. Some of these leaks are large enough to be seen from orbit. Others are miniscule, yet contribute to a growing problem.

Identifying and repairing them is a relatively straightforward climate solution. Methane has a warming potential about 80 times higher than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, so reducing its levels in the atmosphere can help curb global temperature rise. And unlike other industries where the technology to decarbonize is still relatively new, oil and gas companies have long had the tools and know-how to fix these leaks.

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MethaneSAT, the gas-detecting device launched in March, is the latest in a growing armada of satellites designed to detect methane. Led by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, and more than six years in the making, the satellite has the ability to circle the globe 15 times a day and monitor regions where 80 percent of the world’s oil and gas is produced. Along with other satellites in orbit, it is expected to dramatically change how regulators and watchdogs police the oil and gas industry.

“Companies do a good job of complying with the law, but the law has been insufficient,” said Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel at As You Sow, a nonprofit group that has used shareholder advocacy to push fossil fuel producers to tackle climate change. “So this change will increase incentives for reducing methane emissions.”

Those at Vandenberg or watching online were a bit on edge. A lot could go wrong. The SpaceX rocket carrying the satellite into orbit could explode. A week before, engineers worried about the device that holds the $88 million spacecraft in place during launch and pushes it into space. “That made us a little nervous,” recalled Steven Wofsy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University and a key architect of the project along with Steven Hamburg, the scientist who leads MethaneSAT at EDF. If that didn’t go wrong, the satellite could still fail to deploy or have difficulty communicating with its minders on Earth.

They needn’t have worried. A couple hours after the rocket blasted off, Wofsy, Hamburg, and his colleagues watched on a television at a hotel about two miles away as their creation was ejected into orbit. It was a jubilant moment for members of the team, many of whom had traveled to Vandenberg with their partners, parents, and children. “Everybody spontaneously broke into a cheer,” Wofsy said. “You [would’ve] thought that your team scored a touchdown during overtime.”

The data the satellite generates in the coming months will be publicly accessible — available for environmental advocates, oil and gas companies, and regulators alike. Each has an interest in the information MethaneSAT will beam home. Climate advocates hope to use it to push for more stringent regulations governing methane emissions and to hold negligent operators accountable. Fossil fuel companies, many of which do their own monitoring, could use the information to pinpoint and repair leaks, avoiding penalties and recouping a resource they can sell. Regulators could use the data to identify hotspots, develop targeted policies, and catch polluters. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking steps to be able to use third-party data to enforce its air quality regulations, developing guidelines for using the intelligence satellites like MethaneSAT will provide. The satellite is so important to the agency’s efforts that EPA Administrator Michael Regan was in Santa Barbara for the launch as was a congressional lawmaker. Activists hailed the satellite as a much-needed tool to address climate change.

“This is going to radically change the amount of empirically observed data that we have and vastly increase our understanding of the amount of methane emissions that are currently happening and what needs to be done to reduce them,” said Dakota Raynes, a research and policy manager at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “I’m hopeful that gaining that understanding is going to help continue to shift the narrative towards [the] phase down of fossil fuels.”

With the satellite safely orbiting 370 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mission enters a critical second phase. In the coming months, EDF researchers will calibrate equipment and ensure the satellite works as planned. By next year, it is expected to transmit reams of information from around the world. Its success will depend on the quality of the data it can produce and — perhaps more importantly — how that data is put to use.

The European Space Agency released the first global measurements of atmospheric methane three years after launching the Environmental Satellite, or Envisat, in 2002. In 2009, three years before the Envisat mission ended, Japan’s Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, or GOSAT, made its orbital debut. These early progenitors established a new era of worldwide emissions accounting, but they lacked the geographic precision required to inform meaningful action.

In the years since, a hodgepodge of governmental agencies and private-sector organizations has deployed 23 more satellites, including MethaneSAT, to glean additional insights. Some improved upon the pioneering technology by mapping global emissions with greater fidelity and surveying the world with what one could call a wide-angle view. But most measure emissions in targeted areas with what amounts to a telephoto lens.

The images they collect, however, are nothing like what a Nikon might capture, because methane, like most gases, is invisible to humans. So these satellites rely on a spectrometer to reveal the infrared signature the gas leaves behind, exposing not only its presence, but its concentration.

How large a chunk of the world a satellite can map, and the resolution it can provide, depends primarily upon the magnifying power of its telescope. Typically, a higher magnification allows the examination of smaller areas in greater detail, while a lower magnification is best for analyzing vast areas in less detail. The instruments aboard each satellite have all been designed with a unique combination of sensitivities and resolutions tailored to its primary mission. Given GOSAT, for example, was designed to track methane and greenhouse gas concentrations over the entire planet in coarse resolutions, it would have no trouble measuring methane emissions across Southern California and beyond, but it would condense Santa Monica into a single pixel. On the other hand, with the privately owned GHGSat focused on taking images of precise areas and identifying the facilities responsible for emissions, its satellites could map the city of Santa Monica in exquisite detail and pinpoint a sizable methane leak to within 80 to 160 feet, but would struggle to provide any indication of what’s happening beyond the city.

EDF saw an opportunity to create a satellite capable of doing both by designing MethaneSAT’s instrument to take images that cover 125 miles of Earth’s surface, enough to capture most of an oil field spanning dozens of miles in a single frame with sufficient resolution to identify small groups of wells and other infrastructure within that expanse. The nonprofit and its researchers began to see the need for such a device about a decade ago, at the height of the fracking boom. The organization was coordinating the work of hundreds of scientists who “were creating more data about methane emissions from the oil and gas industry in the U.S. than anyone had,” Hamburg said, “by orders of magnitude.”

EDF flew spectrometers aboard airplanes over oil fields, and discovered that the EPA had severely underestimated the amount of methane emitted by oil and gas operations. Although these studies proved invaluable, the scientists couldn’t conduct these labor-intensive, aerial campaigns at the scale or frequency required to understand global methane emissions and how they evolved. That piecemeal approach made clear that no one understood the extent of the problem. Even for the areas they could image, “you’re getting snapshots,” Hamburg said, “but not a motion picture.”

Hamburg and his colleagues set out to determine what it would take to monitor the world’s most productive oil fields on a near-daily basis to determine where, and how much, methane escaped and how those emissions were changing over time. “We’d done enough looking,” Hamburg said, “that we didn’t think the existing satellites or the planned satellites were going to provide that data.”

As they pondered how to fill this gap, Robert Harris, EDF’s lead scientist until his passing in 2021, encouraged Hamburg to get in touch with Wofsy. Wofsy had promised himself he would never get involved in a satellite mission, but the prospect of the measurements this one could collect became too tantalizing to pass up. The more the two Stevens came together to talk and “mind meld,” Hamburg said, the more they realized they shared a vision for a mission that could slot neatly between wide-angle global mappers and the telephoto point imagers, filling a gap that, until then, no one had aimed to address.

The ability to measure emissions across large areas and identify the worst polluters could reshape how regulators design policy. In recent years, climate scientists and activists have spotlighted “super emitters” — large leaks spewing a disproportionate amount of methane. But EDF’s research has shown that focusing on gross polluters risks overlooking the cumulative contributions of small, persistent leaks. In 2022, its researchers found that although low-production oil and gas wells produce just 6 percent of the nation’s fossil fuels, they generate around half of the industry’s methane emissions. That is despite releasing pollution at less than one-tenth the rate of even the smallest super emitters. The data coming from EDF’s new satellite will be able to help quantify and constrain the emissions coming from gross polluters and smaller sources alike — something that will prove invaluable.

“MethaneSAT will play a very crucial role with advocacy and policymaking,” by showing not only a given region’s total methane emissions, but how that changes over time, said Jean-Francois Gauthier, a senior vice president at GHGSat, which operates 12 of its own methane-monitoring satellites and markets services and data to both the public and private sectors, including fossil fuel companies. “Now you can start having very targeted policies and regulations.”

Given the sophistication of tools like MethaneSAT and the four satellites GHGSat plans to add to its flotilla later this year, it is ironic that the EPA’s current enforcement strategy is fairly low tech. The agency requires the fossil fuel industry to report its own emissions and augments that data with occasional aerial surveillance — an approach that limits it to capturing emissions for a specific period of time over a limited area. Oil and gas operators must estimate the emissions from their equipment, but the methodology is largely based on outdated data, and they aren’t required to report large releases due to malfunctions.

As a result, the EPA is underestimating the scale of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by as much as 76 percent, according to researchers. Shayla Powell, an EPA representative told Grist that the discrepancies between the agency’s analysis and satellite-based estimates may stem from the needto draw national conclusions from local observations. Super-emitters “may not be accurately captured using current methods,” the representative said. “EPA continues to work with researchers to compare results, identify specific sources of discrepancies, and make improvements.”

Recognizing the global reach and nearly real-time coverage that satellites can provide, the EPA plans to capitalize on all that data. Its new Superemitter Program will allow certified third parties to provide the agency with data documenting leaks. It will then reach out to the company responsible for the emissions, which will have five days to open an investigation and 15 days to report to the EPA. A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act directs the EPA to charge $900 per metric ton of methane released beyond a certain threshold. The trove of information coming back from space can help the agency measure how much operators are spewing.

The EPA places strict detection and resolution requirements on the data it will accept, but even if one firm’s satellite can’t take photos that meet those guidelines, its findings could inform the work of others and provide the agency with actionable information. “In the space business, it’s called ‘tip and cue,’” said Riley Duren, who leads Carbon Mapper, a nonprofit dedicated to measuring planet-warming emissions. “If one satellite sees something, it can tip off another one and they can queue up measurements to follow up.”

But whether all the data will ultimately help reduce methane emissions remains an open question. For years, Sharon Wilson, a self-proclaimed methane hunter and director of the environmental group Oilfield Witness, has been scouring oil and gas fields nationwide and documenting massive leaks. She uses an optical gas imaging camera, which makes the invisible emissions visible, to document how fossil fuel operators have been flaring natural gas with impunity. Over the last eight years, she has submitted more than 500 complaints with video evidence of leaks in the Permian Basin in West Texas and other oil fields to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the agency responsible for enforcing environmental rules in the state. It has rarely taken action. Wilson worries that any satellite data will similarly be dismissed.

“The bottom line on this whole thing is it doesn’t matter how many thermographers we have, boots on the ground, satellites flying in the air, people with drones and airplanes and all the other technology, none of it matters if you don’t stop methane,” Wilson said. “None of it counts.”

If operators fail to take action after being notified through the EPA’s Superemitter Program, it’s unclear whether enforcement action will fall to the states. The EPA has delegated responsibility for enforcing parts of the Clean Air Act to states, which has led to disparities in accountability. The new methane rules finalized by the EPA late last year require states to develop an implementation plan. If state plans are inadequate, the agency is expected to roll out a federal one. When the EPA has taken this approach with other pollutants such as smog, states like Texas and Louisiana have often submitted inadequate implementation plans.

How the EPA chooses to follow through may not be clear for a couple more years. The agency is currently vetting those interested in submitting methane data. Publication of any data third parties provide may not occur until 2026, at which point the EPA will need to take appropriate action against polluters.

“You don’t just need people to collect the data attributed to an operator or a facility,” said Raynes, the Earthworks researcher. “You also need people who are actually going to follow through to make sure that that operator fixes the problem. There’s a little less clarity in all of [this] about whether that’s being accurately planned for.”

Satellites — no matter how sophisticated — have limitations, and the responsibility to take action falls to regulators. Ultimately, having more granular data makes it more difficult for oil and gas companies and regulators to deny that leaks exist. “Having that greater access to that finer level of actual, empirically-observed measurement is going to change the conversation about methane,” said Raynes.

This article has been updated to clarify that the images of the methane leaks in Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas were captured by Carbon Mapper.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

Biden’s climate law fines oil companies for methane pollution. The bill is coming due.

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Recent research suggests the IRA’s methane fee could batter the oil and gas industry to the tune of more than $1 billion.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the 2021 U.S. climate law abbreviated IRA, primarily reduces emissions through financial incentives, rather than binding rules. But in addition to all its well-known carrots, lawmakers quietly included a smaller number of sticks — particularly when it comes to the potent greenhouse gas methane, which has proven to be a pesky source of increasing climate pollution with each passing year. New research suggests that those sticks could soon batter the oil and gas industry, which is responsible for a third of all methane emissions in the U.S.

An IRA provision directs the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, to charge $900 for every metric ton of methane above a certain threshold released into the atmosphere in 2024. The issue is particularly challenging to tackle in oil and gas fields because methane is the primary component in natural gas, and it leaks from hundreds of thousands of devices scattered across the country. In 2022, oil and gas facilities emitted more than 2.5 million metric tons of methane.

The methane fee is one of a handful of ways in which the Biden administration is trying to get the industry to clean up its act. Late last year, the EPA finalized a rule requiring drillers to take comprehensive measures to monitor for and fix methane leaks. Separately, the agency is revising a rule that governs how companies count up and report the volume of methane emissions from their operations. That rule in particular will determine the EPA’s ability to assess the success of its methane reduction rule and help it calculate defensible fees to penalize companies for their emissions.

A new analysis by Geofinancial Analytics, a private data provider, found that some companies may be liable for tens of millions of dollars in fees — a possibility that could bankrupt some operators. The analysis, which relied on satellite data, found that the top 25 oil and gas producers in the country would together have been liable for as much as $1.1 billion if the methane fee was applied to emissions for a one-year period ending in March 2023.

On the one hand, major players like Chevron and Shell, which have publicly welcomed the new methane fee rule, are well below the rule’s threshold for penalizing emissions, according to Geofinancial. (This is likely due to large companies’ relative technological sophistication and economies of scale.) The fee only goes into effect when companies emit methane at volumes equivalent to more than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide, which means that smaller companies, too, are largely exempt from the rule. Still, a 2022 Congressional analysis found that, despite the exemptions, the rule should effectively penalize about a third of all methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas infrastructure.

As a result, industry trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute, which represents a large swath of the oil and gas industry, have pilloried the rule and backed a proposal to repeal the fee.

Some of the largest potential liabilities stemming from the rule, according to Geofinancial’s analysis, belong to Diversified Energy Company, a seasoned operator with about two decades in the oil and gas industry but an unusual business model. While the Exxons and Chevrons of the world typically rely on drilling new wells and increasing fossil fuel production to generate revenue, Diversified’s growth is heavily dependent on buying old wells at the end of their lives and wringing every last bit of oil or gas out of them. These low-producing wells come with serious environmental liabilities: The older the well, the more expensive it is to complete the required steps to seal it and prevent additional pollution — and the more likely it is to leak copious amounts of methane.

Diversified, which has become the largest owner of oil and gas wells in the U.S., has some 70,000 such old and potentially leaky wells — making it potentially one of the biggest methane emitters in the industry as well. According to Geofinancial, Diversified would be liable for as much as $184 million if its annual excess methane emissions are equivalent to what it released over the year ending in September 2023. While the satellite results are a snapshot in time and contain some uncertainty, the overall finding that Diversified is probably facing catastrophically steep methane fees likely holds regardless of the potential variation.

This potential liability is one of the reasons twin brothers Henry and Chris Kinnersley, founders of the activist investing firm Snowcap Research, are betting Diversified will fail. The brothers are shorting Diversified’s stock — making a big bet, essentially, that the company’s stock value will fall.

“To put the methane fee in context, in the last 12 months Diversified’s free cash flow was $172 million,” said Chris Kinnersley. “We estimate nearly all of this was required to fund new acquisitions to offset the company’s declining production.”

John Sutter, a spokesperson for Diversified, said that the company has taken proactive measures to crack down on methane and that the practices are resulting in significant emissions reductions. “Diversified’s stewardship model shows a viable path forward for mature well operators: that it is possible to cut methane emissions and responsibly manage existing producing assets,” he said.

Part of the reason for the diverging expectations could be that quantifying methane emissions is fundamentally a difficult undertaking. The industry is required to submit its own estimates to the EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program, but those numbers are widely understood to be an undercount. One study by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund found that the industry’s figures may be 60 percent lower than actual emissions. (Editor’s note: The Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.)

Based on research largely from the 1990s, the EPA has developed emission factors for every type of equipment found in oil fields. That means that, to comply with the EPA’s rules, operators first count up the various methane-emitting devices they own and operate, then multiply the number of devices by the corresponding emission factor to arrive at their total emissions for the year.

This approach falls short for two major reasons. When devices fail or malfunction, they tend to release large volumes of methane well above those accounted for by the emission factor — but the industry currently isn’t required to report these large releases. Additionally, the EPA’s emission factors are outdated, having been developed decades ago, well before the fracking revolution. New drilling and production technology has led to new and increased sources of methane releases, which the agency’s emission factors don’t fully capture.

Since calculating a fee to levy on operators requires an accurate and defensible count of the methane companies are spewing, the EPA proposed updating the reporting requirements last year. The proposed rule contains updated emissions factors based on new research. It also requires companies to report large releases if they become aware of them. Still, these measures aren’t expected to fully eliminate the gap between the emissions companies are reporting on paper and true emissions.

“It’s likely to help close the gap but not get all the way there,” said Edwin LaMair, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. “A lot of those large releases will not be seen and then won’t be reported.”

To increase the probability that large releases are caught, the EPA’s regulations include a provision for watchdog groups to report methane data independently. Over the last few years, the capabilities of satellite technology and aerial flights have been leveraged to get more accurate information about methane emissions from oil and gas fields. Nonprofit groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, for instance, have conducted aerial flights over the Permian Basin, the largest oil-producing region in the U.S. Earthworks, another environmental group, has long used infrared cameras to observe well sites and report faulty equipment. That empirical evidence can now be independently submitted to the EPA for consideration as it calculates methane fees for companies.

In particular, satellite data is expected to play an important role in holding companies accountable. The Environmental Defense Fund, for instance, is planning to launch its own satellite in the coming months to monitor methane. The data from the satellite is expected to be posted to a public website.

There’s also the data from existing satellites, which firms like Geofinancial have utilized. The data provider relied on a satellite launched by the European Space Agency that can provide a resolution of one square kilometer at best. In dense oil fields like the Permian in Texas and the Bakken in North Dakota, there are often multiple wells owned by different companies within a square kilometer. Scientists at Geofinancial used statistical methods to attribute emissions to specific operators, but there is some inherent uncertainty in the estimates. While the findings may not be precise, they are still valuable to investors and the public trying to grasp a company’s contribution to the methane problem and its potential financial liability.

“We’re conveying the empirical data, which has plus or minus error bars on it,” said Mark Kriss, the managing director at Geofinancial. “Even at a given wellhead, a one-kilometer pixel, in many cases, we have pretty good confidence about who’s responsible for that, but not in every case. But when you aggregate things at the company level, we have very high confidence.”

For investors like the Kinnersleys, that data is valuable even with all its uncertainty. Until 2021, Diversified calculated its methane emissions using the EPA’s methodology. But that year, the company switched to a method developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which allows companies to self-measure emissions in the field. The company claimed that the measurement-based work “highlighted the negative implications of using prescribed, theoretical emissions factors in our calculations as compared to using the actual measurements from the true operations of our assets.”

The resulting emissions were 60 percent lower than in previous years. The main difference came from how the company estimated its emissions from pneumatic devices, which are used to move fluids. The EPA’s method requires that the company use an emission factor of 13.5 for pneumatic devices, but the company calculated a lower emission factor of 5.5 through measurements in the field.

“As a third party, it’s very difficult to verify whether that new, updated emission factor is actually fair,” countered Chris Kinnersley. “There’s lots of ways you can game that. You can go to newer wells at certain times and you can say, ‘Hey, we sat outside this well, and it was only emitting this much.’”

Sutter, the Diversified spokesperson, did not respond directly to questions about the Kinnersleys’ allegations, but the company told Bloomberg that the brothers’ “report contains numerous inaccuracies, ignores specific financial and operational results and sustainability actions, and is designed for the sole purpose of negatively impacting the company’s share price for the short seller’s own benefit.”

As satellite technology matures and the EPA’s rules for reporting are finalized, advocates expect transparency around methane emissions will increase. The EPA is expected to audit the emission numbers that companies turn in more closely.

“They’re going to be beefing that process up in light of the methane fee, since now there’s a financial incentive to misreport their emissions or omit certain things,” said LaMair. “They’ll be able to find these discrepancies, continue to improve their reporting methodologies, and find the companies that might be underreporting.”

Despite war at home, Palestine arrives at global climate conference

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Hadeel Ikhmais left her home in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem at 5 a.m. on Tuesday to catch her 5 p.m. flight to Dubai. Ikhmais is the head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, or EQA, and for months she and her colleagues had been planning to attend COP28, the annual United Nations climate conference taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, this year. Encouraged by the fact that an Arab nation was hosting the conference for the second year in a row, the Palestinian government had paid the United Nations tens of thousands of dollars to secure a pavilion for the first time ever. Pavilions serve as spaces for press conferences, delegate meetings, and venues to showcase a country’s climate priorities to COP attendees. Palestinian delegates spent months designing visuals for the pavilion, securing funds for travel, and preparing materials for the conference. Nearly 50 delegates planned to attend.

Then, on October 7, Hamas launched an assault on towns and villages in southern Israel, and the Israeli military responded with a bloody bombing campaign across Gaza.

Overnight, traveling to Dubai became more dangerous. Bethlehem is located in the West Bank, an area of Palestine that has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. The region does not have an airport, and Ikhmais would have to make the trek to the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan, about 60 miles away. The journey to Jordan had always been exhausting, but after October 7, the Israeli checkpoints that dotted the road to the border became treacherous. Lines were long, travelers were forced to wait for hours, Israeli soldiers conducted intrusive physical searches, and rumors were swirling that the Israeli government might close the checkpoints. Being out in the streets at all was frightening; In recent weeks, the Israeli military has killed civilians in raids on the occupied West Bank.

“I was scared to leave my house because to go to another city during these situations, it’s not an easy thing,” said Ikhmais. “You are going to travel somewhere that you don’t know what is going on.”

Ultimately, Ikhmais passed through the Jericho checkpoint and successfully made her flight to Dubai. In total, fewer than 10 Palestinian delegates made it to Dubai, each facing long and challenging journeys. Her colleague Ahmed Abuthaher, for instance, had a similar experience the previous day coming from Ramallah.

But both Ikhmais and Abuthaher said that despite the daunting travel challenges, it was important to have Palestinian representation at COP28. Gaza is experiencing the impacts of sea-level rise on its Mediterranean coast, and Palestinian farmers are contending with flooding, drought, and drastic fluctuations in temperatures. Additionally, Palestine’s recognition as a member under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, and its subsequent participation in COPs is an assertion of its statehood.

The entrance to Palestine’s pavilion at COP28 in Dubai. Grist / Naveena Sadasivam

“Even with the difficulties that we face on the ground — the war in Gaza or the Israeli aggression in the West Bank — we are part of the world,” said Abuthaher, who is a director general at the EQA and Palestine’s lead contact on climate change with the United Nations. “And even though our emissions are very, very limited, we are part of this fight. We have to do our part to help others combat climate change.”

That Palestine is even a member of the UNFCCC is the result of a long and hard-fought battle. The government was interested in signing onto the treaty in the late 2000s, but its experience with a different arm of the U.N. held back its admission. It hit a roadblock in 2011 when UNESCO, the U.N. agency that aims to further international peace and security through the promotion of education and culture, voted overwhelmingly to admit Palestine as a full member. In response, the United States withdrew a huge sum of funding from UNESCO, citing a 1994 law that bars Congress from providing capital to any U.N. body that “grants full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.”

After the U.S.’s decision, “We were very reluctant to join any international platform,” so as “not to cause any harm to developing countries who were looking for that kind of financial support,” said Nedal Katbeh-Bader, who worked as an advisor at the EQA from 1999 until his retirement earlier this year.*

Nonetheless, the agency recognized the importance of joining the UNFCCC. Entering the treaty would afford Palestine equal recognition among the world’s countries and, Katbeh-Bader emphasized, unlock funding opportunities for climate adaptation efforts that the EQA was struggling to get off the ground. In addition to the restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation, Palestine’s attempts to thwart climate change have been stymied by its location in the Eastern Mediterranean, where temperatures are rising at almost twice the rate of the global average. With the UNESCO fiasco a fresh memory, environment officials in Palestine began meeting with other governments to build a case for admission to the UNFCCC. They won the support of Arab states and, in the lead-up to COP21 in Paris, the French government.

Shortly after the Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, establishing the goal of keeping the global average temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, Palestine was admitted to the UNFCCC. “The French presidency helped us a lot,” recalled Abuthaher. “After the finalization of the COP, we submitted our application, and there was no objection.”

Palestine was the first U.N. member from the Arab world to sign the agreement, and among the first 15 globally. When its membership was announced in early 2016, a State Department official said that the decision would not impact the U.S.’s participation in the UNFCCC. But upon joining, Palestinian officials immediately ran into challenges trying to secure funding.

Developing nations often rely on global institutions funded by wealthy nations to finance climate projects. One of the main climate funds is the Global Environment Facility, an intergovernmental body headquartered in Washington, D.C. The U.S. is its biggest shareholder. In the summer of 2016, EQA Chair Adalah Atteerah contacted the Global Environment Facility’s then-CEO, Naoko Ishii, to request funding, but months passed with no response. Repeated attempts to reach the organization over the following year were ignored. (The Global Environment Facility declined to comment in time for publication, citing time constraints.)

“We have two challenges facing us to be able to implement these climate action plans: the Israeli Occupation and the lack of financial resources,” wrote Atteerah in a letter to world leaders before COP24 in Poland in 2018. Palestine had signed onto the UNFCCC in “good faith,” she said, but the funding it needed to fulfill its duties to the convention was being withheld by “some entities.”

All UNFCCC members are required to develop a document called a Nationally Determined Contribution, or NDC, which outlines their annual greenhouse gas emissions and their plans to reduce them.

Palestine submitted its first NDC to the UNFCCC in 2017 and an updated version in October 2021. The document cites adaptation to climate change as its main goal, since Palestine contributes minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions. Both that report and Palestine’s National Adaptation Plan, which it submitted to the U.N. in 2016, name numerous challenges stemming from the Israeli government’s strict control over Palestinian land and natural resources. One of the focuses of both documents is the agricultural sector, which the vast majority of Palestinians rely on for their livelihoods. Rain-fed agriculture accounts for more than 80 percent of farming in Palestine, and increasingly frequent dry spells and soil evaporation from high temperatures are degrading the quality of the harvest. The National Adaptation Plan notes that the Israeli occupation has limited Palestinians’ ability to develop wastewater treatment plants, which could provide an alternative form of irrigation to save desiccated crops.

Another focus of the reports is the electricity sector, which currently only fulfills 2 percent of domestic demand, according to the EQA. The Israeli government effectively controls the lights in Palestine, with the majority of Palestinians’ electricity coming from the Israel Electric Corporation. As a result, electricity outages are common, particularly in times of heightened tension and violence such as the Israeli military’s ongoing campaign in Gaza. Before the war, approximately 25 percent of Gaza’s power came from rooftop solar, significantly more than in Israel. The NDC outlines multiple goals, such as the expansion of solar power and the establishment of a national high-voltage grid, but the authors cited complications to these ambitions, too. Israel has historically rejected most of Palestinians’ permit applications for solar development.

Abuthaher said that the EQA submitted a permit request about five years ago to the Israeli government for just 500 square meters of space — about a tenth of a football field — near Jericho to erect solar panels to power a few households. But the land was in Area C, a region in the West Bank administered by Israel, and the EQA was denied permission. “In Area C, we face huge difficulties,” Abuthaher said. “We need their permits.”

In some instances, Israel has also bombed solar panels. In 2018, Palestine received funding from the World Bank to build a 7-megawatt rooftop solar project in Gaza. But the $11.2 million project, celebrated as one of “Gaza Strip’s brightest beacons of promise,” was bombed by the Israel Defense Forces in May 2021. The airstrikes damaged 5,000 of the 21,000 solar panels and caused an estimated $5 million in damage.

Ikhmais and Abuthaher said that in the past, there was an informal understanding that the Israeli government wouldn’t target projects built with foreign funding. “It was a trust that Israel would not harm any project with donor funding,” said Abuthaher. “But that is not the case on the ground.”

The Green Climate Fund, which was established under the UNFCCC to help developing countries finance climate projects, has greenlit several projects in Palestine, including a water banking project in Gaza, a national platform for its climate initiatives, and making water infrastructure more climate resilient. Some of these projects — like the water banking project — were operational before the recent conflict, but Abuthaher said he doesn’t know whether they’ve been bombed in the last couple of months.

“Everything that helps to protect the environment is damaged and destroyed,” Katbeh-Bader said. “Whatever you can imagine in your worst dreams, you will find it in Gaza.”

When the current crisis ends, Ikhmais said the EQA will need to conduct a wide-ranging and detailed assessment of the damage. “We are just waiting for these horrible things to end,” she said.

Get caught up on COP28

What is COP28? Every year, climate negotiators from around the world gather under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to assess countries’ progress toward reducing carbon emissions and limiting global temperature rise.

The 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP28, is taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, between November 30 and December 12 this year.

What happens at COP? Part trade show, part high-stakes negotiations, COPs are annual convenings where world leaders attempt to move the needle on climate change.

While activists up the ante with disruptive protests and industry leaders hash out deals on the sidelines, the most consequential outcomes of the conference will largely be negotiated behind closed doors. Over two weeks, delegates will pore over language describing countries’ commitments to reduce carbon emissions, jostling over the precise wording that all 194 countries can agree to.

What are the key issues at COP28 this year?

Global stocktake: The 2016 landmark Paris Agreement marked the first time countries united behind a goal to limit global temperature increase. The international treaty consists of 29 articles with numerous targets, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing financial flows to developing countries, and setting up a carbon market. For the first time since then, countries will conduct a “global stocktake” to measure how much progress they’ve made toward those goals at COP28 and where they’re lagging.

Fossil fuel phaseout or phasedown: Countries have agreed to reduce carbon emissions at previous COPs, but have not explicitly acknowledged the role of fossil fuels in causing the climate crisis until recently. This year, negotiators will be haggling over the exact phrasing that signals that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels. They may decide that countries need to phase down or phase out fossil fuels or come up with entirely new wording that conveys the need to ramp down fossil fuel use.

Loss and damage: Last year, countries agreed to set up a historic fund to help developing nations deal with the so-called loss and damage that they are currently facing as a result of climate change. At COP28, countries will agree on a number of nitty-gritty details about the fund’s operations, including which country will host the fund, who will pay into it and withdraw from it, as well as the makeup of the fund’s board.

Dive deeper:

The decade-old broken climate promise that looms over COP28

The world is careening toward 3 degrees of warming, UN says ahead of climate conference

*Correction: This story originally misidentified Nedal Katbeh-Bader’s former position at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org