Annual Report2025

To cut methane at scale, the world needs to run, and win, two races at the same time: a deployment sprint and an innovation marathon. Livestock methane sits at the center of both.

Part of the challenge is deploying solutions we already have: better animal health, improved productivity, and stronger management practices can reduce emissions intensity today, particularly in developing countries where livestock productivity gaps remain large. Methane-reducing feed additives can also cut emissions in some intensive production systems. Scaling these approaches is the deployment sprint: aligning policy, finance, and markets to move proven solutions into widespread use.

But today's tools are not enough. Globally, most cattle are in extensive grazing systems where existing solutions, like feed additives, remain difficult to deploy. Meanwhile, promising approaches with broad application, like methane-reducing vaccines, have yet to be developed. Winning the innovation marathon will require sustained R&D, stronger industry coordination, and clearer pathways from science to deployment.

In 2025, Spark worked across multiple fronts to accelerate livestock methane solutions. We co-hosted the world's only dedicated summit on livestock methane science and solutions, bringing together researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders to align priorities and surface key research gaps. We helped build and launch the Global Enteric Methane Impact Alliance—the first global industry alliance dedicated to this problem—and convened the Livestock Methane Policy Coalition to coordinate policy efforts across leading organizations. Together, these efforts are strengthening the coordination and institutional infrastructure the field has long lacked.

Last year, working with leading scientists, NGOs, and industry experts, we also published the first strategic roadmap for accelerating livestock methane solutions—assessing the full pipeline from interventions available today to next-generation technologies still in development. The roadmap's release drew immediate interest from funders, researchers, NGOs, and policymakers.

In 2026, we'll build on that momentum through continued engagement to clarify gaps and opportunities and help guide the field toward greater impact.

Nitrogen is essential for feeding the world, but today's system is deeply inefficient, offering major opportunities to cut emissions.

At the start of 2025, agricultural nitrogen was a Spark "exploratory area": a high-impact topic that warranted careful analysis, but one where the shape of a program to meaningfully address the problem was not yet clear.

Under the leadership of Spark Principal Scientist Dr. Eric Davidson, one of the world's leading experts on nitrogen, we took a hard look at the challenge. The scale of the opportunity was clear. Each year, large amounts of nitrogen, primarily from fertilizer and manure, are applied to agricultural systems. Yet only a small percentage of that nitrogen ultimately ends up in the food we eat.

The nitrogen lost to the environment drives nitrous oxide emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas about 275X more potent than carbon dioxide, while also harming our air and water, degrading ecosystems, and worsening human health.

Working with other scientists and partners across the field, Spark helped develop a shared vision for a next-generation approach to nitrogen: Nitrogen 2.0. The core idea is to move beyond existing incremental approaches to unlock major reductions in nitrogen loss through transformative innovations in crop breeding, animal feeding, and manure management.

Through our work with partners, it became increasingly clear that nitrogen represented a major opportunity for impact, so Spark decided to move from exploration to action. We hired Dr. Maria Bowman, who brings deep expertise across government, industry, and conservation, to lead the development of a full program to turn the Nitrogen 2.0 vision into a targeted set of actions to move the field forward.

In 2026, we will officially launch the program with a strategic roadmap and targeted research and policy engagements—helping catalyze solutions that turn agricultural nitrogen from an unsolved climate and health challenge into a clear opportunity for progress.

Imagine a near future where fossil fuel emissions are declining. Clean energy dominates and electric vehicles are widespread, yet the planet keeps warming faster than expected.

That future isn't inevitable, but it is plausible. As the Earth warms, changing natural systems, such as wetlands, permafrost, forests, and oceans, are starting to release more greenhouse gases while their natural ability to absorb and store carbon weakens. The result is a self-reinforcing feedback cycle: warming triggers more emissions, which drive even more warming.

These warming-induced greenhouse gas emissions are one of the biggest blind spots in climate science and policy. While long discussed by scientists, they remain poorly quantified and are largely excluded from climate models, carbon budgets, and global policy frameworks, including the Paris Agreement, leaving a critical gap in global mitigation, adaptation, and greenhouse gas accounting strategies.

In 2025, Spark, working alongside key partner organizations, began a concerted effort to help close this gap. We brought on leading scientist Dr. Ben Poulter, formerly at NASA, who previously served in the White House helping lead development of a U.S. national greenhouse gas measurement and modeling system, to launch and lead Spark's new Warming-Induced Emissions program.

With support from philanthropic partner Alta Futures, we rapidly stood up the program's first major initiative in October 2025: the Warming-Induced Emissions Model Intercomparison Project (WIEMIP). This coordinated effort brings together leading Earth system modeling teams from around the world to produce the most complete picture to date of these emissions on an accelerated timeline to inform the next IPCC assessment cycle. This will improve key projections of future warming used to inform policy planning and risk management decisions.