Governments Must Not Adopt Methane Reporting Tool That Enables Greenwashing, Say Climate Experts

Over 60 climate activism groups have penned an open letter urging governments not to adopt GWP*, a controversial methane reporting tool that leaves the door open for greenwashing.

A day after a New Zealand government panel paved the way for the country to weaken its livestock methane reduction efforts, climate experts from across the world have implored policymakers not to adopt this controversial approach.

The approach concerns the use of GWP*, a metric for reporting the global warming potential of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s an approach being pushed by livestock producers under terms like “no added warming”, “climate neutrality” and “temperature neutrality”.

Currently, governments and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) use GWP20 and GWP100 to measure the warming potential of total greenhouse gas emissions over a period of 20 and 100 years, respectively. GWP*, on the other hand, focuses on changes in the rate of emissions between two points in time (usually over a decadal timescale), rather than the absolute level of emissions.

Essentially, it means that GWP* only addresses new or extra methane emissions – it assigns a global warming potential of zero if companies continue to produce the same amount of methane as they have done historically.

If adopted, it would enable high-polluting countries and businesses to present even minor methane reductions as negative emissions or cooling, helping meat and dairy production appear climate-neutral and escape significant transformation.

The letter – which was co-signed by 64 organisations, including Feedback Global, Changing Markets Foundation, Greenpeace, and Mighty Earth, among others – says this could “seriously undermine international efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C”, reward big polluters, and unfairly penalise low-income countries in the Global South.

“The meat and dairy industry’s latest trick is to claim their production system is ‘not adding warming’, and with just small reductions, they can claim ‘neutrality’,” notes Alma Castrejon-Davila, a senior campaigner at Changing Markets Foundation. “These claims are deceptive and can have severe implications towards countries with historically low emissions as well as the climate targets under the Paris Agreement.”

New Zealand livestock lobby successful in pushing GWP*

Methane is a gas 86 times more potent than carbon over a 20-year period, and has a warming impact 28 times stronger over 100 years. It is responsible for a fifth of global warming, and is mostly human-caused. As things stand, anthropogenic methane emissions are set to rise by up to 13% from 2020-30 – and meat and dairy production alone accounts for nearly a third (31%) of the share.

Reducing the amount of methane we produce is imperative for the fight against climate change, and while some companies and organisations have been developing ways to reduce the methane footprint of agriculture, most government action has been found lacking.

In New Zealand – which is home to the world’s largest dairy company in Fonterra – half of all emissions come from agriculture, and mostly methane. Faced with pressure to lower emissions, livestock groups like Dairy New Zealand, Meat Industry New Zealand and Beef & Lamb New Zealand have been lobbying the government to adopt GWP* and promote the approach in international circles.

This would allow the country to claim to be methane-negative by 2038 with just a 10% reduction in emissions – but GWP100 estimates suggest that New Zealand would still be generating 30 million tonnes of the gas each year.

The nation’s independent climate advisory, the Climate Change Commission (CCC), has opposed the use of GWP*, but the new conservative government appointed its own panel in June, chaired by a former board member of Fonterra, who is also a member of a powerful lobby group called Global Dairy Platform. This panel was asked to provide advice on the national methane targets in line with the use of GWP*.

The group concluded that a 14-24% reduction in biogenic (non-fossil-fuel) methane by 2050 (from a 2017 baseline) would be enough, despite the CCC’s current target being a 24-47% decrease over the same period.

“Under GWP*, New Zealand could declare itself climate neutral whilst actually still emitting 76% of its current methane and continuing current CO2 and N2O emissions from all other sectors by 2050,” the letter states.

“While GWP* is a useful model for narrowly measuring the change in warming impact of methane emissions over time at global level, it is totally inappropriate as a metric for measuring progress on climate impact by businesses and countries, or for measuring the total ongoing warming impact of greenhouse gas emissions globally,” it adds.

GWP* ‘simply incompatible’ with climate science

In an accompanying report, Feedback Global highlights why GWP* is a “dangerous and inappropriate” climate metric. They argue that it lets historical methane emitters continue polluting – in contradiction with the ‘polluter pays’ principle – rewards them for minor reductions, and helps carbon emitters continue polluting through carbon offsetting.

It would further reward historically high methane emitters, usually in the Global North, whilst “heavily penalising countries in the Global South for comparatively low methane emissions”. Additionally, GWP* would “severely damage international efforts to restrict global methane emissions from the livestock sector” and compromise efforts to cut carbon and nitrogen emissions in other sectors by allowing the potential for minor methane reductions to be used as offsets for other emissions.

The letter argues that GWP* is “open to significant abuse”, since the same volume of methane emissions can be described as causing warming, no warming or even cooling, depending on the choice of baseline year.

Demonstrating how companies can mislead consumers, a report by Changing Markets Foundation last yar found that it could claim to be producing no net warming with a 17% reduction in emissions by 2030 using GWP*. And with a 30% reduction, between 2020 and 2030, the company could claim to be removing 19 million tonnes of CO2e. But using GWP100 estimates, Fonterra would still be producing over 21 million tonnes of emissions per year – similar to the annual emissions of Sri Lanka.

“Scientists have raised the alarm that significant reductions in methane are required – by at least 33% by 2034 and 47–60% by 2050 – to meet the Paris Agreement. Therefore, a ‘no added warming’ approach of merely stabilising the impact of major methane emitters is insufficient, particularly in a context where likely overshoot of 1.5 degrees global warming makes temperature reduction necessary,” the organisations write.

Paul Behrens, an associate professor at Leiden University, says: “The goal of ’no additional warming’ is simply incompatible with climate science. The result of such a lack of ambition is an increasingly hostile world with more climate disasters for our families, our children, and future generations. It also spells disaster for the livestock industry because agriculture is incredibly exposed to climate disasters like heatwaves and flooding.”

“The Paris Agreement calls for governments to implement policies which reflect their ‘highest possible ambition’ – a ‘no added warming approach’ is directly contrary to this, diminishing ambition,” reads the letter.