How to fund measurable methane reductions at scale — and fast

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.

Methane is responsible for nearly a third of current global warming, yet it remains significantly underfunded relative to its climate importance. What makes methane uniquely compelling is its potency and its speed: it warms the planet far more strongly than CO₂ in the near term, and it’s short-lived in the atmosphere. That combination means reducing methane releases now can slow near-term warming quickly and help bend the temperature curve, buying time while the world undertakes the longer work of decarbonizing energy, industry and transport. 

But why is progress not moving faster, even when many solutions are already known? A big part of the answer isn’t technology. It’s a market design. 

Methane headwinds

Across methane sectors, the benefits of mitigation are global and shared, while much of the costs of action are local and upfront. This mismatch produces a familiar failure mode: projects struggle to finance early deployment and policymakers struggle to move from ambition to implementation without a repeatable, bankable pathway that doesn’t bring political risk. 

This imbalance is compounded by an accountability gap. Most companies don’t explicitly measure a “methane footprint,” although any company that buys fossil fuels, contracts natural gas, relies on gas-fired power, produces or consumes food, or depends on methane-linked supply chains has meaningful methane exposure upstream and downstream. 

The issue usually isn’t  a lack of concern — it’s the absence of practical market structures that make methane reductions financially viable, repeatable and durable at scale.

A particularly compelling place to start is biowaste, one of the largest and most solvable methane opportunities on Earth.

Biowaste accounts for approximately 50 percent of global waste and is nearly 100 percent recyclable, yet less than five percent of its material is biologically treated. When organic materials (food scraps, green waste, and other biogenic residues) are buried in landfills, they decompose without oxygen and generate methane. Diverting organics away from landfill burial and toward biological treatment — composting and anaerobic digestion — turns a major methane source into productive outputs like organic fertilizers and green power. 

The pathway to achieve methane reduction targets is proven. The real bottleneck lies in execution: waste systems are governed at the local level and operate through fragmented contract ecosystems, where cities, haulers, facility owners, regulators and financiers all need to move in sync — often within tight budgets and uneven operational capacity. 

Biowaste also stands out as a global opportunity because it can deliver absolute cost savings at a system level. Landfilling frequently looks inexpensive only because costs are hidden or socialized. The system fails because the economics are often mispriced at the point of decision-making. Biological treatment requires upfront capital, reliable feedstock contracts and stable revenues. 

Cities may want organic diversion but hesitate if it raises near-term costs or requires contract restructuring. Developers may want to build capacity but cannot finance it without predictable demand. And corporate buyers may want credible methane action but struggle to catalyze implementation across jurisdictions. A system-wide challenge requires a coordinated effort across stakeholders — led by organizations that can fund early action. 

The case for a coalition 

This is where a coalition — a methane biowaste-focused Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) — becomes an unlocking mechanism. An AMC isn’t a pledge. It’s a market signal: credible buyers pool forward commitments for a defined outcome, creating predictable demand that makes early projects bankable and scalable. This coalition approach has already accelerated climate outcomes in adjacent domains, such as Frontier Climate, which captures carbon via  high-tech solutions, and the recently launched Superpollutant Action Initiative, which will invest up to $100 million to lessen the impact of methane, soot and refrigerants. 

For biowaste, a coalition can move quickly because it does three things at once: it makes early projects financeable, turns fragmented local opportunities into a scalable pipeline, and drives down costs through learning and scale. Just as importantly, it can accelerate policy and corporate responsibility by making implementation easier by creating a repeatable pathway that municipalities and private operators can adopt. 

To make AMC-driven investments durable and compounding, a clear financing and policy roadmap is needed — one that starts with catalytic finance and then broadens responsibility and participation as systems mature, using existing mechanisms. One solid pathway includes: 

• Phase 1: Catalytic carbon finance for methane prevention. Anchor buyers (especially net-zero companies with material methane exposure) can pool their advance commitments tied explicitly to verified methane prevention (and mitigation) outcomes in coalitions to mitigate risks and support each other.

• Phase 2: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). Food Waste EPR expands and stabilizes funding by aligning part of the system cost with food suppliers and consumer packaged goods companies that place waste-generating products into the economy, helping move diversion from isolated projects to standard, market-based practice. 

• Phase 3: Pay-As-You-Throw. This is a policy and utility model in which residents are charged for trash collection based on the amount they generate.  Once infrastructure exists, this mechanism helps sustain performance by aligning everyday behavior with waste prevention and proper separation — linking fees to disposal so diversion rates persist. 

For buyers, the value is direct: a methane biowaste-focused coalition gives early buyers a credible, high-integrity way to fund measurable methane reductions at scale, while building infrastructure that communities and biowaste producers can sustain. It also offers a rare “triple win:” it targets near-term warming, reduces total costs, and delivers tangible co-benefits tied to sanitation, soil health, circular resource recovery and green jobs. 

In addition, the impact potential is substantial. The UN’s Environment Programme Global Methane Status reporting indicates that full deployment of methane-targeted measures in the waste sector can cut annual emissions by 16 percent by 2030 versus projected levels under current legislation and prevent roughly 1.8 gigatons of CO₂ equivalents per year by 2050. Superpollutant coalitions are an important and welcome development. They signal that corporate buyers are ready to move beyond carbon removal and into near-term warming reduction. What they’ll need to deploy capital effectively is exactly what’s always been missing from the waste sector: a sector-specific investment roadmap, a pipeline of bankable projects, and digital monitoring, reporting and verification infrastructure that can scale. The biowaste AMC serves as that roadmap. The question now is who moves first.