Landfills across African cities are catching fire and releasing methane, an invisible greenhouse gas with more short-term warming potential than CO2. Sustainable strategist Mohamed A. Sultan reveals how local communities are turning this crisis into opportunity, diverting hundreds of tons of waste from landfills and helping thousands of farmers adopt more sustainable techniques. Learn why cutting methane emissions is a win-win opportunity to drive down global temperatures while also creating more livable cities. (This ambitious idea is part of The Audacious Project, TED’s initiative to inspire and fund global change.)Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. 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 0.3 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.
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