Climate Change Commission lays down wero over methane targets

Analysis: On Saturday, the Government preempted nearly a year of work by the Climate Change Commission by announcing a separate review of New Zealand’s methane emissions targets, just 48 hours before the commission was due to publish its own analysis on the subject.

Now, in that document, the commission has fired back with a stern and not-so-subtle warning that there is no reason the goals for reducing climate pollution from livestock and waste should be watered down.

Though the commission’s review of New Zealand’s methane targets (and the 2050 net zero goal) would have been fully completed well before the Government announced its own separate review, officials at the independent advisory body had clearly anticipated where the methane debate was heading. In part, this is because the farming lobby groups whose pleas for a review were picked up by the Government had also submitted their views to the commission.

At issue is whether the methane targets – a 10 percent reduction from 2017 levels by 2030 and a 24 percent to 47 percent cut by 2050 – need altering. The sector has advocated for them to be weakened ever since they were first announced, preferring an approach that would in effect “lock in” the agriculture industry’s contribution to climate change but constrain it from worsening the problem.

When that advocacy fell on deaf ears in the Labour government, the industry turned to a new tactic: commissioning research it claimed provided new evidence for why the targets are too ambitious. That research again relies on the perspective of reducing New Zealand’s ambition to merely targeting “no additional warming” from methane.

When Dairy NZ, Federated Farmers and Beef + Lamb submitted this research to the commission, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton made the unusual move of getting involved, writing to all four parties to dispute that it had arrived at any novel conclusions.

“This study appears to be more or less a repeat of the modelling exercise I commissioned and summarised in my 2018 note on New Zealand’s methane emissions from livestock,” he wrote.

In the meantime, however, the National Party had picked up the “no additional warming” torch, promising during the election campaign to review the methane targets with this principle in mind. Now in government, National has launched this review, with an expert panel to be picked by ministers at a later date.

The commission has remained silent on this so far, while its officials worked away on the review of the targets that they are required to complete every five years under the Zero Carbon Act. But the debate did not go unnoticed by the commission staff, who have now put out a rebuttal to the industry talking points and laid down a wero for the Government.

There is, the commission said, “no evidence to support weakening the current 2050 target, and enough to consider strengthening it”. The evidence for strengthening extends to the methane components of the 2050 target, as the faster-than-expected deployment of methane-inhibiting technology for livestock overseas means we could set ourselves a more ambitious pathway for slashing methane emissions.

Specifically, though there has been new research on methane emissions since the target was set, “there has not been an important or notable change in the understanding of the physical science of methane and how it warms the atmosphere”, the commission said. This is an explicit point of difference with the agriculture industry’s submission on the commission’s review.

Contrary to assertions from the industry that methane’s warming impact has been overstated, the commission also found methane was responsible for the majority of the warming New Zealand had caused to-date. That aligns with separate findings Upton published in 2022, based on research by the climate scientists Dave Frame and Nathanael Melia.

In a different section of the report, the commission specifically examines the “no additional warming” concept. Adopting this would lead to a weakening of the methane components of the target, it concluded. Then, the Government would have to choose to strengthen the climate targets for every other sector to compensate or to accept “higher emissions and an increased amount of warming than the current target”.

“We have not analysed in detail what biogenic methane emissions would result under a no additional warming approach, because such a technical analysis would hide the more fundamental question: should Aotearoa New Zealand cause more global warming than implied by the current 2050 target?” the commission wrote.

After examining the current target, the commission found it is already too weak and inconsistent with New Zealand contributing to the global fight against climate change. Given that, the commission said it had “found no grounds that would justify an increase in the overall amount of global warming caused by Aotearoa New Zealand’s emissions”.

There is no mechanism under the Zero Carbon Act for amending the methane target if the Climate Change Commission doesn’t recommend changes. That doesn’t stop the Government from changing the legislation to let itself change the target if its separate review panel comes to a different conclusion from the commission, but it would highlight how the independent commission’s advice was being dismissed.

It is now for ministers to choose to pick up the wero and accept the commission’s findings, or to ignore it and start the latest battle in New Zealand’s long-running war over agricultural emissions.