A climate metric developed by Oxford University to correct substantial flaws in how the warming effect of emissions is widely calculated has been dismissed as “not credible” science by the Farmers for Climate Action lobby group.

FCA CEO Natalie Collard made the comment to the ABC on Friday in response to news the Australian red meat industry had dropped its Carbon Neutral 2030 target.

“We understand RMAC dropping the carbon-neutral by 2030 target because most farmers won’t achieve net-zero emissions by then,” she told the ABC.

“However, we’re a science-based organisation, so we can’t pretend ‘climate neutral’ and ‘GWP*’ [global warming potential] is a credible science.”

The FCA’s view reflects that of scientists Mark Howden and Richard Eckard, who told an FCA webinar in November 2023, summarised by Beef Central in this article, that the debate over methane emissions metrics was a “distraction” and that the industry needed to reduce methane emissions if Australia is to achieve the Paris agreement goals.

However, in contrast to their position encouraging producers not to challenge existing methane accounting metrics, other scientists have revealed glaring inaccuracies in the existing approach, in ways that can severely and unfairly penalise livestock producers, particularly those with herds that remain relatively stable in size.

Research by Professor Myles Allen from Oxford University, who led the team which developed GWP*, has demonstrated that the existing method of treating all greenhouse gases, including methane, as “CO2-equivalent”, leads to errors that overstate the warming effect of emissions from stable herds of cattle by 300 to 400 percent, and understates the emissions from growing herds by a similar amount.

Professor Allen advocates for industries to separate methane and carbon dioxide in emission targets (see his comments below).

On Climate Neutral tartets, the United Nations launched the Climate Neutral Now initiative in 2015, which “encourages and supports organizations to act now in order to achieve a climate neutral world by 2050, as enshrined in the Paris Agreement”.

FCA position

In response to Beef Central’s request for FCA to expand on why it doesn’t believe Climate Neutral or GWP* is a credible science, FCA CEO provided the following response:

“FCA understands RMAC dropping the carbon neutral by 2030 target because most red meat farmers won’t achieve net zero by 2030.

“As Beef Central has previously reported, GWP* is not recognised under international reporting rules or the Paris Agreement, which uses GWP 100. As Beef Central has also previously reported, experts say GWP* fails to account for the cumulative warming impact of past methane emissions and also that one of Australia’s most respected scientists has said: “The idea that you are cooling the earth if you reduce methane emissions is fundamentally not true”.

“We understand RMAC wants to move to a ratio of the weight of the livestock to emissions intensity, but this has never been modelled.

“Will our trading partners take us seriously if we argue a kilogram of methane from sheep counts differently to a kilogram of methane from cattle?

“GWP 100 is the credible measure used by the world, because GWP* only reflects changes in emission rates, not the sustained warming from existing methane. So GWP* is not credible to use as a climate change impact measurement because it does not properly account for the impact of historical emissions, although it does provide insights into methane dynamics.

“Stuffing around with measures which are not recognised by the rest of the world hurts farmers.

“If we move to GWP* red meat farmers may lose important trade markets such as the EU, or be slapped with big tarrifs to sell into those markets.

Misinterpretation of industry position

Australian red meat industry leaders say they believe the FCA is misinterpreting their position. While they believe GWP* is credible science and provides a more accurate accounting of the warming effect of livestock emissions than the existing approach, they point out that no firm decision has been made by the industry to “move to GWP*”- see more below.

In recent years critics of livestock production have depicted climate neutrality or GWP* as the red meat industry attempting to develop its own “creative accounting” to let itself off the climate accounting hook.

Earlier this month in an online article headlined “GWP*: How the livestock lobby’s creative accounting threatens to derail climate action”, Greenpeace contended that “agribusiness lobby groups are running a coordinated global campaign to cripple efforts to reduce agricultural emissions and allow them to continue polluting”.

Another prominent example occurred in 2021 when a Bloomberg journalist wrote that beef industry was trying to “erase its emissions with fuzzy methane math”.

Terms such as Climate Neutral and GWP* were created not by the livestock industry but rather by independent scientists in isolation of the industry.

GWP* creator explains science behind the metric

Professor Myles Allen from Oxford University was among a team at University of Oxford which developed GWP* as simple way to correct significant errors in the way the widely-used GWP-100 calculates the warming effect of different emissions.

In response to FCA’s comments that GWP* was ‘not a credible science’, Professor Allen from Oxford University provided the following comment to Beef Central:

Methane emissions are an important driver of global warming, and we need to reduce them to meet our climate goals, but as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put it in its most recent report, “expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent emissions using GWP-100 overstates the effect of constant methane emissions on global surface temperature by a  factor of 3–4, while understating the effect of any new methane emission source by a factor of 4–5 over the 20 years following the introduction of the new source.” All that GWP* does is provide a simple way of correcting for these over- and under-statements by including these factors in the calculation of warming-equivalent emissions. There are other methods, including using a climate model to calculate warming impact, that give broadly similar results. So it is simply not true that we don’t understand how methane emissions affect global temperatures: there are uncertainties, of course, but the big picture is clear.

 “What the science does NOT tell us, and the IPCC is crystal clear on this, is how to translate this information into national and sector-level targets. These necessarily depend on many other factors as well, including the costs and feasibility of action, historical responsibilities and so on. What everyone does agree on is that, in pursuit of a global temperature goal, we need to indicate separate contributions of methane and carbon dioxide in emission targets, rather than relying on CO2 equivalent emissions whose warming impact are ambiguous.”

Dr Michelle Cain, a science and policy research associate on the Oxford Martin School’s programme on climate pollutants at the University of Oxford, has also previously explained in detail why treating all greenhouse gases as “CO2-equivalent”, which is what happens under the GWP-100 metric widely-adopted decades ago, misrepresents the impact of short-lived climate pollutants, such as methane, on future warming.

Air quality specialist Professor Frank Mitloehner from the University of California, Davis, has also written extensively on the science underpinning GWP* – some examples include Is GWP* really fuzzy math? You decide; Putting GWP* to the test and Seeing stars from the GWP* debate.

In the article “Putting GWP* to the test” he explained:

“GWP* offers insight on how methane warms our climate that can’t be uncovered with GWP100.

“The older metric, GWP100, converts each greenhouse gas to a carbon dioxide equivalent, but in so doing, it fails to account for the behavior of the flow gas methane as its impact on temperature wanes over time.

“Conversely long-lived gas such as carbon dioxide will influence temperature for centuries but the short lived climate pollutant methane does not.

“As a result, many scientists are of the mind that GWP100 has given us an inaccurate picture of the climate impacts caused by methane, in some cases overestimating the impact of emissions and underestimating in others.

“This is important, because measuring greenhouse gases with GWP100 would mean we could not accurately anticipate how reducing emissions of either gas will impact our climate, with methane-induced warming rapidly reversed once emissions start to decline but CO2-induced warming persisting for a long time even when emissions have ceased.”

A study conducted by the CSIRO for Meat & Livestock Australia in 2021 showed the Australian red meat industry was making strong progress toward Climate Neutrality, having reduced net greenhouse gas emissions by almost 78 per cent against the 2005 baseline.

‘It is a credible metric’

Cattle Australia vice-president Adam Coffey said FCA appeared to be misinterpreting what was in Red Meat 2030 and the MLA Strategic Plan.

“No one is suggesting we ‘move to GWP*,” he said.

“It is a credible metric and one that we have and will continue to measure against.

“I don’t understand why FCA want to argue against the people they supposedly represent.

“As a farmer member I’d be pretty concerned that they refuse to acknowledge a metric that gives a much more accurate reflection of livestock’s climate impact.”