On January 16th, a research paper titled "Human-impacted lakes contribute over one-third of global lake greenhouse gas emissions" was published in One Earth, a Cell journal, by the team of Professor Xia Xinghui from the School of Environment at Beijing Normal University.

The summary of this paper is as follows:

Lakes are an important source of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yet the extent of human influence and thus mitigation potential remain unclear. Here, we conducted a global meta-analysis and classified global lakes into four types: human-impacted urban and non-urban lakes, and natural permafrost and non-permafrost lakes, and observed significant variations in lake size, nutrient concentrations, GHG fluxes, and area-flux relationships across types. We estimate that globally, lakes emit 813.0 (Q1–Q3: 575.7–1,235.9) Teragram CO₂-equivalents year⁻¹. Human-impacted lakes cover 19.7% of total lake area yet contribute 36.2% of total emissions, with disproportionately high emissions of CH4 (41.8%) and N2O (52.7%). Within human-impacted lakes, those larger than 0.1 km² are the major contributor to GHG emissions (88.4%). We speculate that lake GHG emissions could be reduced by 23.1% globally, if fluxes of human-impacted lakes decrease to levels comparable with natural non-permafrost lakes through sustainable lake water quality management.

Reference: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.10156