The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has today released a landmark report identifying methane as a key greenhouse gas (GHG) to include in strategies tackling global warming ‘unequivocally’ caused by human activities including livestock farming.

In the wake of 40 years of climate negotiations including the Paris Agreement, carbon dioxide has traditionally been the focus of ‘net zero’ and other emissions reduction strategies while methane has been largely ignored due to it representing a smaller proportion of all GHG emissions. Methane also breaks up many times faster in the atmosphere than CO2, taking 20 years to disappear rather than hundreds.

However, methane absorbs more energy, has a warming potential 84 times greater than that of carbon dioxide and is responsible for up to a quarter of all global warming, prompting the authors of today’s IPCC Sixth Assessment Report to dedicate an entire chapter to methane and identify its reduction as the planet’s best hope for averting climate disaster in the shortest time.

“Stabilising the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions. Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate,” said IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Panmao Zhai.

Report reviewer Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development in Washington D.C., said that the announcement exerted “a lot of pressure on the world to step up its game on methane, telling Reuters that “cutting methane is the single biggest and fastest strategy for slowing down warming.”

Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of energy at Environmental Defense Fund, added that the IPCC report sent out a wake-up call to countries that produce and consume oil and gas to engage in “aggressive oil and gas methane reduction plans,” but that landfill and energy company emissions would be easier to address compared to large-scale agricultural methane due to the absence of scaled-up replacement technology.

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While today’s report stopped short of naming livestock agriculture as a major emitter of methane, it cited extensively the IPCC’s earlier Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) released in August 2019 which stated that “livestock on managed pastures and rangelands accounted for more than one half of total anthropogenic N2O emissions from agriculture in 2014” and signalled the need for agricultural reform.

Today’s report updated the SRCCL, adding that growth in the concentration of atmospheric methane since 2007 had accelerated between 2014 and 2019 largely driven by emissions from the fossil fuel and livestock-dominated agricultural sectors.

Somewhat ironically, the IPCC report revealed that smoke and other particulate air pollutants emitted since the mid-1800s had actually helped to keep the planet cool by reflecting away the sun’s radiation. Efforts to reduce smoke and improve air quality in recent years could see that protection disappear, causing temperatures to spike and adding to GHG warming effects. The IPCC author’s pointed to methane reduction as a way to counteract that effect while also allowing efforts to improve air quality to continue.

Worldwide, methane is responsible for 30 per cent of all warming since the pre-industrial era, said the UN, yet it has taken until now for the role of methane and other short-lived pollutants to be discussed in detail.

Could it be that the UN’s report is finally the evidence that the world’s governments need to scrap animal agriculture and act upon the urgency of switching to a plant-based food system? Is the fact that methane has been largely overlooked for 40 years a reluctance to accept that something as basic yet profound as our food choices is destroying the planet, or could it be the combined influence of powerful lobbying groups from both the energy and animal agriculture sectors? 

Add to this that removing animal farming not only eliminates the production of huge amounts of methane every year which in turn slows down the cooling process, but it would also afford us more time to rewild and reforest the reclaimed farmland, sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide. If CO2 really is the priority for government net zero strategies, then the need to remove methane from livestock farming from the equation has never made more sense.

With our role in the looming climate disaster now undeniable, and methane responsible for a quarter of global warming, now is the time for governments to be brave and switch to plant-based for the planet, the animals, public health and our lasting food security.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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