A new report by the UN says that cutting methane emissions is the quickest way to slow down global warming and it can also deliver multiple wins for people and the planet. Cutting human-caused methane emissions by 45% by 2030 can prevent 225,000 premature deaths per year due to air pollution and avoid lower crop yields. But the report reveals the battle between the most effective solutions and the art of what’s perceived to be possible. The multiple benefits are significant, as seen in the chart below.
Source: UN/Climate and Clean Air Coalition
Methane is a short-lived but very powerful greenhouse gas, 86x more powerful than CO2 over a 20-year period and it dissipates in 10—12 years. The biggest sources of human-caused methane are agriculture, fossil fuels and waste dumps. But there is a gap between the UN’s analysis of the problem and the proposed solutions, revealing some of the practical and political challenges of tackling the climate crisis.
Source: UN/Climate and Clean Air Coalition
Cutting emissions from fossil fuel and waste dump operations can be done relatively quickly and is lower-cost. These include sealing leaks in oil and gas installations and sending less biodegradable waste to dump sites. Agriculture is the number one source of methane at 42%, and 80% of this comes from animal agriculture from the digestive systems of cows and sheep, their manure, and fertilizer to grow feed crops. And this number could be low. A new study says that methane from livestock in the US is being significantly undercounted given current measuring methods.
But the UN report suggests that agriculture can contribute only 20—25% of the reductions because of the perceived difficulty of changing our food and agriculture systems and convincing enough people to quickly adapt what they eat. Add to that the expedient inclination to tinker with the current agriculture system, like feed additives, rather than adopting wholesale changes in production systems and food choices.
The significant benefits of reform in this sector could be even greater with more ambition. “Three behavioural changes, reducing food waste and loss, improving livestock management, and the adoption of healthy diets (vegetarian or with a lower meat and dairy content) could reduce methane emissions by 65–80 Mt/yr over the next few decades,” the report says. These recommendations show the political and cultural challenges of fighting the climate crisis and the difficult, sometimes unpalatable, trade-offs involved.
The challenge is to overcome the deeply embedded cultural traditions that tend to drive our food choices and how we produce our food, never quick or politically easy. But the science is clear that we cannot meet the Paris climate goals or net zero by 2050 without changing how we produce our food and what we eat. Numerous authoritative studies show that richer nations need to significantly reduce the amount of meat and dairy to reduce global heating. Even if we were able to stop all fossil fuel GHGs today, emissions from our food system mean that we would still blow by the Paris Climate goals.
The danger is that vested interests from the fossil fuel and/or Big Food and ag systems combined with political opportunism that weaponizes perceived threats to traditional diets and meat eating, work to undermine climate action and shut down one of the most effective ways to avert the climate crisis.
The opportunity lies in the attitudes of younger generations who are more open to changing their diets to reduce their carbon footprint, the plethora of tasty and more widely available plant-based foods and the emergence of cell-based meat alternatives without the downsides of industrialized animal agriculture.