Cattle industry look to alternative metrics to measure methane impacts

Cattle Australia's deputy chair and southern Qld cattle producer Adam Coffey aired his concerns at the Northern Territory Cattlemen's Association conference at Alice Springs and urged producers to help change the cattle emissions narrative.

"It is having an impact on the livestock sector," he said.

Mr Coffey outlined, incorrect predictions of changes to radiative forces were happening for short-term gases such as methane, when using the Global Warming Potentials-100 metric.

"This is why we have an interest in alternative metrics," he said.

"There are plenty of greenhouse gas metrics out there which are developed by scientists and accepted."

Mr Coffey's key point was industry and government were free to use whichever metric was most suitable for industry, as long as it was science-based and consistent in reporting.

"The one issue with the GWP-100 metric, is it has been sitting there for 30 years," he said.

An alternative metric which has been looked at by Cattle Australia, is Global Warming Potential-Star.

"It is about better quantifying the warming effect of methane emissions within the atmosphere, which is very important to cattle producers," Mr Coffey said.

Fossil methane is very different to biogenic methane from grass-fed sources, according to Mr Coffey and when fossil methane breaks down in the atmosphere, it adds another carbon dioxide atom to the atmosphere, whereas biogenic methane, does not.

"The CO2 released from biogenic livestock methane when it breaks down, is simply replacing CO2 removed from the atmosphere by the photosynthetic process of growing grass which cattle eat," Mr Coffey said.

"Those scenarios can change within different operations but this is where we are headed, and we need to try and understand this."

He acknowledged methane was a powerful warming gas but believed it was important to understand that ruminant livestock emissions were different from one-way fossil emissions.

Mr Coffey believed plenty of scientists also believed a more accurate metric could be used for the livestock sector.

"They are not advocating for the industry but they are saying, perhaps scientifically, there is a better way we can be looking at things," he said.

"The scientific community is increasingly questioning carbon neutral targets relying on GWP-100 accounting metric, so it is a serious issue and we need to evolve."

A report which was commissioned on behalf of industry by CSIRO principal research scientist Dr Bradley Ridoutt, triggered a rethink for Cattle Australia about where the industry was headed under Carbon Neutral 2030 and emissions pathways.

The report, Pathways to Climate Neutrality, released in 2023, articulated, measured and quantified where industry was situated and, with models and strategies in place, where it might end up.

"The report basically said we are not going to make carbon naturality, we will miss it by about 17 megatons of CO2," Mr Coffey said.

"This was with all of the interventions modelled, including 80 per cent of that modelling related to reforestation of around 10-million hectares of Australian farming landscape."

Mr Coffey believed the report revealed some "daunting" information but if climate naturality was based on an alternative metric, the outlook was much more positive.

"If it was based on a metric which is scientifically proven to measure a gas like methane and its warming effect in a better fashion, it showed, we are predicated to reach a point of climate neutrality by 2028 as a red meat sector and 2026, as a grass-fed cattle sector," he said.

"This is a huge milestone and I am not aware of any other livestock sectors around the world which have reached a climate natural point."

Mr Coffey saw this leap as very important.

"We can sell a product and claim that we are not adding anymore atmospheric warming, no other sector can do that," he said.

He also believed the ongoing use of GWP-100 reinforced the misconception that the cattle industry were "big one-way emitters."

"It is up to industry to change this narrative, if we don't, no one else will."

According to Mr Coffey another report revealed measuring methane emissions with the GWP-100 metric overstated the warming impact of a constant source of emissions by 300 to 400pc.

"In Australia, how methane emissions are accounted for, annually, we are in a scenario where it has been scientifically acknowledged our emissions have been overstated by three to four times," he said.

"This is the present state of play for livestock emissions and we need to rewrite the narrative of cattle being big bad emitters to being part of the climate solutions based on science."