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It turns out the smell is the least of our worries when it comes to landfills.
In this talk, sustainability strategist Mohamed A Sultan shares why methane gas the odorless, invisible gas, is so dangerous for our health and our well-being.
Showcasing different examples of sustainable development projects across the African continent.
He offers an alternative path towards a world with low methane emissions and shares why this is not only good for the planet, but good for people everywhere.
Have you ever smelled a landfill?
Well, that smell is probably not the worst thing that it produces.
Methane gases.
And you cannot see or smell it until it catches fire.
And that's unfortunately what's been happening in many cities across the continent in Dakar, in Accra, in Kampala, in Osaka and recently at the Pietermaritzburg landfill in South Africa.
Now just imagine being one of the thousands of kids affected by that fire.
Every breath you take is kind of a tighter chest, a sharper headache.
It's really unacceptable.
And these landfills, they catch fire for many reasons.
One of them is that we keep sending organic waste there that decays in the absence of oxygen, creating the conditions for methane to come up.
There's many ways that we know how to solve this question of dangerous landfills.
First of all, stop producing as much waste and sending it there.
Sort and treat what's already there.
And radically improve the governance of those sites.
Doing that homework has immediate benefits, particularly for populations living nearby.
It improves air quality and it reduces the risk of fire.
And it turns out that addressing methane out of these landfills plays a very important role in tackling the global question of climate change.
I'm a social and economic development professional.
I've spent the bulk of my career looking at how this continent transforms to meet the demands and the ambitions of its people, at the intersection of democracy, security and economic opportunity.
And it's kind of always been clear to me to get to a certain degree of sustainable development, we need to embed climate in our plans, and I've joined the Global Methane Hub and it's become abundantly clear that effective climate progress also requires methane action.
And that is because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas.
It has contributed up to 45 percent of the net warming that we're experiencing today.
That's because it is 86 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide is over 20 years.
And all of you and myself, we know that we've got to do so many things simultaneously to address this question of both climate and development.
And long-term decarbonization is one of the primary goals.
But methane offers us an additional opportunity.
If we're able to come together and reduce methane emissions by 50 percent over the next 20 years, it allows us the opportunity to lower the rate of global warming by 03 degrees Celsius.
That may not sound like much, but it is a lifeline.
It is also one of the most effective ways that we know of to reduce short-term climate-induced vulnerability, and that is important all over the globe obviously, but it is critically important for this continent that's disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change.
We lose up to five percent of our yearly economic output to adverse climate events.
The costs of adapting societies, our societies and our economies to changing climate are skyrocketing upwards of 50 billion dollars.
So this idea of addressing short-term vulnerability, it's not a nice-to-have.
It's an imperative as we build towards long-term resilience.
And look, 60 percent of these vulnerability-inducing emissions come from sectors that have traditionally been associated with economic progress.
Fossil fuel energy, waste management and sanitation, as well as agriculture, rice production and livestock.
Some regions are emitting a lot more than others and need to do a lot more, and a lot faster, to address their own emissions if we're going to meet our collective objectives.
Africa has a lower footprint than many other regions.
But that is changing.
It's changing because we're growing populations, we're growing our economies.
And so we've kind of got to embrace this duality where we absolutely need to usher in a new developmental model that rapidly lifts people out of poverty, creates opportunity and provides for more dignity, but to do so in a way that minimizes these emissions that are creating the vulnerability that plagues us today.
And luckily, it's happening in many ways on the continent.
Think back to those burning landfills that we discussed.
Well, in Durban, a different picture is coming up.
Organizations have come together civil society, government officials, research institutions to ensure that no or less organic waste ends up in a landfill 35 kilometers outside of the city and therefore hopefully limiting methane emissions.
And to do so, they've partnered with two of the largest city fruit and vegetable markets.
And, rather than throwing away unused or unsold produce, they collect it and they transform it into an asset class.
They compost it.
Remarkably, over two years they've been able to divert 277 tons of organic waste away from that landfill.
They've created sustainable, safe, well-paying jobs for the community.
They have reduced the city's costs in landfilling and transportation.
And that compost is going in to improve the quality of city parks that families like yours and mine can end up enjoying.
These are real benefits that also end up reducing methane, and it is the power of community-driven action, underpinned by a circular economy approach, that is part and parcel of the systemic change that we need to see and that needs to be supported better policy, better financing and improved governance.
But let's also talk about energy, fossil fuels, major contributor to global methane emissions.
It is also one of the sectors where we kind of know how to abate at costs in the short term.
But let's also be very clear.
This continent will need more energy for better development.
That's an existential question for us.
And, luckily for all of us, 80 percent of new generation capacity coming online in the next few years here will come from renewables.
And if we're able to strategically pair that with adequate investments and adequate planning, it accelerates our ability to diversify our energy mix away from plants and fossil fuels.
And that is really important, first and foremost, for our own energy security.
It is also critically important because it helps us abate emissions today as we transition in the long term.
Because, mind you, the industry well, in gas industry in particular absolutely knows how to solve their emissions problem.
Reduce flares, detect and plug your leaks, improve measurement, do it all over again.
And they have the money to do it.
It's just not happening at the scale and the speed that we need it to happen.
Rely on voluntary commitments.
We absolutely need regulatory frameworks that compel core production.
Because otherwise, this is what we get.
This is a gas flare, right?
It is the burning of methane gas associated with oil extraction.
And it is as dangerous, as wasteful as it looks.
It is associated with high levels of respiratory diseases and high fevers, particularly in children.
And astonishingly, two million people in the Niger Delta in Nigeria live within a four-kilometer radius of one of these things.
And so what do we do?
We regulate, we enforce and we track.
And that's exactly what the government of Nigeria has been trying to do.
It has essentially passed progressive regulation to ensure that it is banning flaring.
Enforcement is where the challenge is obviously, but they're doing so because it makes sense from a public health perspective and it saves lives.
But it also fundamentally makes economic sense.
It creates a potential revenue stream for government from noncompliant actors, but it also reduces energy waste in a country that is plagued with energy insecurity.
Regulate. and force and track.
Let's talk about something else.
Rice.
Some of you are smiling.
I know you love it.
Many people love it.
It's a major global food crop.
In fact, it is consumed by billions of people from Tokyo to my hometown in Conakry in Guinea, and we will need to be producing more of it to meet food security demands.
And rice production is actually both affected by climate change and partly contributes to it, because it emits methane.
Think about the millions of farmers who grow it.
Typically what they do is they flood their fields.
By flooding the field, oxygen cannot get into the soil and it creates the conditions for methane to emerge.
And so how do we solve this?
How do we ensure that we're improving productivity and production to meet food security, but doing so in a way that minimizes emissions?
Well, 11000 farmers in Accra, in Ghana, or around Accra, are working very closely with their environmental protection agency and they're attempting to use a method called alternate wetting and drying.
This is a method that, only when conditions are suitable and applicable, allows them to naturally drain the water off the field.
In doing so, they are managing an incredibly scarce resource that is water, but they're also managing production and productivity and limiting methane emissions.
That is good for the producers.
It's good for consumers.
It's good for food security, because ultimately we will need more resilient and sustainable production systems that also reward smallholder farmers.
And we can't stop there.
We absolutely need to continue to have multidisciplinary spaces in which we provide more solutions, more cost-effective solutions, less risky solutions to these farmers who are central to the systemic change that we want to see in food systems.
And listen.
What I've described here is a series of projects and initiatives that essentially show a window into the nexus between climate development and methane.
And it's certainly not a panacea, and they need scale and they need improvement.
But what they do show is progress that builds momentum that people can get behind because they can see the benefits.
And we will undoubtedly need that momentum, partly because to get to a high development and low methane future we will need systemic improvements.
And that's also why some of the things that African nations have been working towards requires a lot more support, particularly in ensuring that we're able to raise domestic resources and capital that allows us to self-fund climate and development in a way that increases agency and decision-making here on the continent.
Things like bringing together African financial institutions around the Africa Club or addressing the incredibly high cost of capital that we face or sovereign debt burdens.
Unlocking that capital is integral to moving methane action forward because unfortunately a lot of these methane emissions are going up globally and much of it is also underreported.
And so there's really no getting around or away from the centrality of governance and accountability, of which we will need more of, first of all at home, because we need to manage our affairs better, but also globally, to ensure that we're understanding where these emissions are coming from and how we tackle them equitably for greater collective impact.
It's also the case that in this distributed, multipolar world, eventually we'll probably need more, rather than less collaboration, particularly with leaning into domestic capacity in a much more creatively and distributed way across geographies and across disciplines, to support better scientific research and breakthroughs, to improve data measurement capacity across the globe and to get to more effective financing options.
And I have no doubt that this continent will rise to the challenge.
First of all, because it is in our own self-interest to move away from vulnerability and into resilience, but also because it is a necessary thing to do.
And I've spoken a little bit about the co-benefits of methane and you'll hear a lot of that, but perhaps it's fitting to flip the script a little bit.
Maybe when we build systems and societies that reward safer, cleaner and livable cities, more resilient, more nutritious food systems, more diversified and productive energy systems.
Low methane is itself the co-benefit of that better developmental pathway.
And that is good for planet, but it is also fundamentally good for people.
And hopefully, that's something that you all can also get behind.
Thank you.
That was Mohamed A. Sultan at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025.
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And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
