Climate experts have urged Ireland not to follow New Zealand’s footsteps, after it announced significantly weaker methane targets for agriculture based on a new goal of “no additional warming”.
New Zealand is the first country in the world to formally adopt the goal – known as “temperature neutrality” – which redefines the aim of climate action as stabilising (rather than minimising) the warming impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
Often termed Global Warming Potential* or GWP-star, it takes into account that methane’s heating impact is relatively short-lived compared with carbon dioxide, though it rapidly warms the atmosphere.
The new approach is strongly favoured by the agri-food sector on the basis it would be less onerous on farmers in decarbonising their operations. New Zealand and Ireland have similar livestock-dominant agricultural systems.
RM Block
Methane is the single biggest contributor to Ireland’s greenhouse gases associated with farming, while agriculture accounts for 37 per cent of Ireland’s total emissions. Globally, the other biggest source of methane is oil and gas production.
There are fears the New Zealand move could cause a domino effect and undermine global efforts to keep warming within the 1.5 degree threshold set in the Paris Agreement.
Minister for Climate, Environment and Energy Darragh O’Brien has yet to decide if Ireland will take this course. He was asked to comment on the New Zealand decision.
Temperature neutrality was recommended by the Climate Change Advisory Council in setting future carbon budgets.
Greenpeace Aotearoa warned the New Zealand approach would “violate the Paris Agreement and embolden other major livestock exporters, including Ireland and Uruguay, to follow suit”.
Shefali Sharma, global agriculture campaigner with Greenpeace International, added: “New Zealand has signalled to the world’s biggest meat and dairy producers that it’s fine to ignore the largest human-made source of methane – and in doing so, undermine the Paris Agreement and accelerate global heating.”
University of Galway specialist in agri-sustainability, Dr Colm Duffy, led an international study that concluded, from a global mitigation perspective, that temperature neutrality lets high-emitting, high-capacity countries such as Ireland and New Zealand leave substantial mitigation potential on the table, shifting the burden on to others.
“This directly undermines global efforts to tackle climate change and sets a dangerous precedent that risks a race to the bottom,” he added.
New Zealand’s “no additional warming” methane goal comes despite warnings from climate scientists and the country’s independent Climate Change Commission that emissions must fall sharply.
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This is “a split gas approach” for its climate change goals, acknowledging biogenic methane has different warming impacts than long-lived greenhouse gases.
Its revised target is net-zero emissions of all emissions other than biogenic methane by 2050. It will include, however, a 24 to 47 per cent reduction below 2017 biogenic methane emissions by 2050, including 10 per cent reduction by 2030.
Organic farmer Thomas O’Connor, of Talamh Beo, a grassroots sustainable farming organisation, said: “As agro-ecological farmers working for food sovereignty we are deeply concerned that Ireland may follow the same destructive path as New Zealand, further entrenching dangerously high methane emission levels that are already driving climate chaos.”
“Just like in New Zealand, we are up against powerful agri business interests spinning misleading narratives to block real climate action. The Government must resist commercial pressure and start reprioritising people, the planet and the future,” he added.
Prof Myles Allen, one of the scientists who created GWP*, told Carbon Brief recently the metric was “nothing more” than one way of better understanding the climate impact of different actions as part of efforts to limit warming under the Paris Agreement.
In June, however, a group of climate scientists from around the world wrote an open letter advising against this, arguing the metric “creates the expectation that current high levels of methane emissions are allowed to continue”.
