Digital Health for Climate Resilience

The greenhouse gases with the strongest impact on climate change are carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O), each possessing distinct characteristics that determine their warming influence. Carbon dioxide is the most significant long-term driver of climate change because human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, have increased its atmospheric concentration by 50% since the Industrial Revolution, reaching levels higher than any time in the last 3 million years . Its potency lies not in its global warming potential per molecule, but in its sheer abundance and persistence in the atmosphere for centuries to millennia. Methane has a global warming potential over 80 times greater than CO₂ over a 20-year period, making it incredibly powerful in the short term, although it has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime of about a decade. Human activities have increased atmospheric methane by over 150%, largely from agriculture (livestock), landfills, and fossil fuel extraction . Nitrous oxide is both a potent greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential nearly 300 times that of CO₂, and the dominant ozone-depleting substance emitted today, with its concentrations rising due to agricultural fertilizer use and industrial processes. While fluorinated gases are industrial products with extremely high global warming potentials, the sheer volume of CO₂ emissions makes it the primary target for mitigation, though rapid reductions in methane are critical for slowing warming in the near term.