New Zealand is considering an invitation to join a new US-led endeavour on reducing agricultural emissions.
As global pressure mounts for a crackdown on the short-lived but potent greenhouse gas methane, New Zealand has been invited to join a multilateral initiative on devising new ways to reduce agricultural emissions - the source of 40 percent of anthropogenic methane.
However, Climate Change Minister James Shaw says he isn't sure whether New Zealand will accept, citing a lack of certainty around what would be involved (or committed) in the process and New Zealand's leadership in existing international groups funding agricultural research and development.
The new alliance, called the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (or AIM for Climate), was announced as a joint American and UAE endeavour at President Joe Biden's climate summit last week. Other founding members include Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Singapore and Uruguay.
"The goal of the initiative is important, to accelerate global agricultural innovation through increased research and development, as it highlights agriculture, science-based solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change," US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said.
However, Shaw said there's a risk AIM for Climate could duplicate work already ongoing in the R&D space.
"There are a lot of multilateral initiatives on climate change in all sorts of things and there is some duplication. We were founding members of something called the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases about a decade ago," he said.
"There's almost 100 countries who are participants in that. The question for us will be, given our limited resource base, if we join this group as well, does that add or detract from our current efforts?
"That's what we need to assess. We do, frankly, get asked to join initiatives by other countries all of the time. We just can't join everything, even if we're interested, just because we just don't have the resources to spread ourselves that thinly. So we do have to pick and choose a bit."
UN report to call for cuts
The announcement at the climate summit came just weeks ahead of the expected release of the United Nations' Global Methane Assessment. A leaked copy of the summary of the major report, viewed by The New York Times and Reuters, calls for steep cuts to methane emissions.
By 2030, the summary reportedly says, methane emissions should fall 45 percent in order to avert 0.3 degrees of warming over the next decade.
Similarly, a study published this week in Environmental Research found that warming could be slowed by 30 percent if all available measures to reduce methane emissions were taken now. That would avoid 0.25 degrees of warming by 2050 and up to 0.5 degrees by 2100.
At issue is the difference between carbon dioxide - the main driver of global warming - and short-lived gases like methane. A tonne of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere will remain there for hundreds or even thousands of years, contributing to warming for the entire time. A tonne of methane will contribute to a much greater degree of warming in the first few decades after it is emitted, but will eventually break down into water vapour and trace amounts of CO2.
Given that, avoiding a tonne of methane emissions will have a greater impact on limiting warming in the next few decades - but a tonne of CO2 will have more grievous long-term effects.
Is methane a red herring?
"If you cut CH4 instead of cutting CO2 ... then you leave behind a warmer world for subsequent generations," Dave Frame, the director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington, told Newsroom.
While those supporting steeper cuts to methane aren't presenting them as an alternative to reducing CO2 emissions, Frame says it is inevitable that efforts against carbon dioxide would suffer.
"The concern my colleagues and I have is that many people in the US, especially, think of CH4 cuts as something we can do today while we find CO2 cuts 'too hard', and by cranking up the exchange rate between the gases ... you can let city dwellers drive their SUVs while pretending to save the world by flaring gas and plugging pipes," he said.
"This is like rearranging the proverbial deckchairs because repairing the hole below the waterline is too hard."
Frame predicted the renewed focus on climate in the United States would see corresponding support for methane cuts increase.
Pressure could affect NZ
That could have major implications for New Zealand. Our emissions profile is 43.5 percent methane, compared to just 10 percent in the United States.
Most of our methane comes from agriculture and waste, and we have set different targets for those emissions (a 10 percent reduction by 2030 and a 24 to 47 percent reduction by 2050) than for others (net zero by 2050). If there's a global push to nearly halve methane emissions by 2030, in line with the recommendations of the UN report, New Zealand's targets could look unambitious.
On the other hand, Shaw thinks agricultural emissions might not be subjected to the same pressure as methane emissions from other sources.
Many of the easiest ways to reduce emissions target the oil and gas sector, which emits methane in the production process. Some of this methane comes in the form of fugitive emissions - something like a leaky tap, where natural gas wells release a trickle of the potent gas that isn't caught or processed.
"The reports that I did see focused very much on fossil methane from gas. We actually have said that we need our fossil methane to drop to net zero, along with nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide. Obviously we have a split gas [target] when it comes to biogenic methane because it actually just has a different cycle," he said.
"But we'll have to wait and see what the UN report says and the extent to which they treat biogenic methane the same or differently as fossil methane."
