Atmospheric methane is surging—and it’s accelerating the climate crisis. Methane concentrations are now nearly four times higher than at any point in the past 800,000 years and rising faster than climate models projected. Despite being 200 times more dilute than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane traps over 80 times more heat in the short term and is responsible for roughly a third of today’s human-caused warming.

Methane is one of the most potent and overlooked drivers of climate change—and also our fastest lever to slow it. Reducing atmospheric methane can curb warming within years, not decades.

Nearly 75% of global methane emissions come from diffuse, low-concentration sources—wetlands, lakes, agriculture, landfills, and wastewater systems—for which no scalable mitigation technologies exist today. And as the planet warms, natural systems are emitting more methane, threatening a dangerous climate feedback loop.

XPRIZE Mission Methane will unlock the full spectrum of methane solutions–-spanning prevention, mitigation, destruction, and atmospheric removal–to rapidly slow warming and lay the groundwork for long-term climate recovery.

 This is one of the most immediate and high-impact climate mitigation opportunities of our lifetime.

Mission Methane is XPRIZE’s boldest climate challenge since Carbon Removal—an audacious, outcome-driven competition designed to catalyze a new field of innovation to mitigate, capture, or eliminate methane from diffuse sources and the atmosphere itself.

To close the technology gap for dilute and atmospheric methane by launching and scaling efficient, climate-positive solutions that can rapidly arrest global warming.

Mission Methane will address a critical blind spot in climate action by catalyzing technological breakthroughs—mobilizing bold innovators to engineer, validate, and scale technologies and solutions that prevent, destroy, or remove methane from diffuse sources or the atmosphere itself—creating rapid, scalable impact.  

By setting clear, measurable performance targets, the prize will accelerate real-world verification and deployment of methane mitigation technologies capable of slowing global warming in our lifetimes. 

This is a turning point—one that redefines what’s possible in methane mitigation and rewrites our climate trajectory for decades to come.