According to satellite data released by the World Bank on Thursday, gas flaring increased by 7% in 2023, reversing a decline in 2022. The rise resulted in extra planet-warming emissions equivalent to 23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) – similar to adding about 5 million cars to the roads, it said.

Gas flaring emits greenhouse gases including black carbon and methane, which has a warming effect about 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period.

The top flaring countries in 2023 were Russia, Iran, Iraq and the United States, with just nine countries responsible for 75% of gas flaring globally.

Last year also saw an uptick in the intensity of flaring, meaning the amount of gas flared per barrel of oil produced, as oil prices spiked above $90 a barrel in the autumn.

In some countries, such as Iran and Libya, increased flaring intensity was attributed to increased oil production, coupled with a lack of investment in and prioritisation of gas recovery and utilisation.

Intensity was also high in countries affected by conflict, such as Syria, where operators struggle to address flaring.

“We’re hopeful that this is somewhat of an anomaly and the longer-term trend will be dramatic reductions,” said Zubin Bamji, manager of the World Bank’s Global Flaring and Methane Reduction (GFMR) Partnership, which monitors flaring and supports governments and oilfield operators to reduce related emissions.

Decoupling trend

That hope is underpinned by the “decoupling of a long-standing correlation between oil production and gas flaring” since the late 1990s, Bamji explained in emailed comments.

Operators can minimise flaring through measures such as re-injecting gas back into the earth or capturing it for utilisation.

Demetrios Papathanasiou, director of the World Bank’s energy and extractives global practice, said in a statement on the data that if the wasted gas were captured and used, it could displace dirtier energy and generate enough power to double electricity supplies in sub-Saharan Africa.

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But others argue that using flared gas more efficiently – or regulating flaring and its related methane emissions – will not be eliminate the practice as long as fossil fuels are still being produced.

“The number one thing we need to do is put the oil and gas industry into decline,” said Lorne Stockman, research co-director at Oil Change International (OCI), a nonprofit group that campaigns against fossil fuels.

Pledges versus regulation

The increase in flaring suggests that growing global attention and initiatives to eliminate flaring have not been “sufficient or sustainable enough”, according to the World Bank’s report.

Operators and countries representing about 60% of flaring worldwide have endorsed the World Bank’s Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 (ZRF) initiative, while 155 countries have signed a Global Methane Pledge, launched at the COP26 climate summit in 2021, to collectively cut methane emissions.

Jonathan Banks, global director of methane pollution prevention at Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group focused on decarbonising energy, said those initiatives are “helpful”.

But, he added, governments and companies are still “not doing nearly enough” to stop flaring, whether in the form of policies to force businesses to take action or energy firms’ own plans and investments.

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That is changing, Banks said, referring to recently introduced regulations in the United States, Canada and the European Union which aim to reduce methane emissions. “But those new policies take time to be implemented and enforced,” he noted.

The EU’s Methane Strategy, adopted in May, will include a methane transparency requirement on gas imports that looks to penalise gas flaring and venting – an even more polluting practice of releasing unignited gas.

“The potential to use access to the European market as a way to drive action is huge,” Banks said, adding that only a global standard, applied to all internationally traded oil and gas, could bring an end to flaring and venting.

US gas “certification”

Without such a standard, oil and gas companies are in practice policing themselves when it comes to curbing flaring and methane emissions more broadly.

In the US, for example, third-party gas “certification” companies track methane emissions coming from oil and gas infrastructure and tell consumers their gas is “responsibly sourced”.

According to OCI, there is no set standard for what level of methane leak reductions qualify natural gas for this label.

“Methane became a reputational issue for the US oil and gas industry a few years ago,” said OCI’s Stockman. “Suddenly we saw this proliferation of companies offering to monitor methane, and provide a certification to gas producers as an incentive to sign up.”

Gas certification is currently part of oil and gas companies’ voluntary efforts to act on their methane pollution – in the US, Colorado is the only state that directly measures methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure. But, according to OCI, the industry is pressing regulators to use certification “as a proxy for regulatory oversight.”

Fossil fuel industry under pressure to cut record-high methane emissions

Research by Earthworks and OCI found that these certifying companies use unreliable technology, which missed all but one of the emissions “events” captured by researchers’ own monitoring equipment.

They also found conflicts of interest on the part of leaders and board members of certification companies, including holding investments in the same oil and gas clients they were working with and promoting fossil gas as a clean energy source.

While regulation is needed, Stockman said, it must be monitored by governments and is near impossible to enforce at scale, due to practical and technological limitations.

Even satellite technology is limited in its capacity to observe small-scale emissions events at “hundreds of thousands of individual sites”, he said.

“We can’t trust the industry,” he added. “The way to keep methane out of the atmosphere is to keep it in the ground.”

(Reporting by Daisy Clague; editing by Megan Rowling)

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As global policymakers, nonprofit advocates and industry leaders meet this week in Geneva to turn lofty promises to slash methane emissions into meaningful action, a crucial stakeholder will largely be missing from the table: the private sector.

The aim of the 2024 Global Methane Forum is to build on the Cop26 climate summit, where more than 150 countries pledged to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030, as well as other methane commitments made at last year’s Cop28.

But ratcheting up private sector action remains a looming agenda item. Because for all those promises, we aren’t seeing the companies in the sectors that contribute most to humanity’s methane emissions – agriculture and energy – take the ambitious steps needed to fulfill them.

In fact, new findings show the energy industry’s methane emissions didn’t budge last year from a near all-time high. Nor have we seen enough investors step up to drive this needed action in the companies they hold.

Fossil fuel industry under pressure to cut record-high methane emissions

Food companies’ agricultural activities, especially raising livestock, and fossil fuel operations, largely from oil and gas companies, are responsible for nearly equal parts of 75% of human-caused methane emissions worldwide.

Food and energy corporations must confront the escalating material financial risks they face from climate change. Lowering methane emissions is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to slow the overheating of our planet in the short term.

There are three key actions companies across both sectors can take to mitigate their main sources of methane pollutants – and in doing so, accelerate the transition to more sustainable and resilient systems for feeding and powering our world.

Disclose plans for reducing emissions

Before they can tackle them, companies need to understand what their methane emissions are, where they come from, and how they can reduce them. These details should be disclosed in their transition plans so that external stakeholders, including investors who use the information to evaluate climate risk in their portfolios, can hold companies accountable for voluntary methane commitments.

More major food companies benchmarked by Ceres in our investor-led Food Emissions 50 initiative are reporting the drivers of their supply chain emissions, but only a few, such as Yum! Brands and Starbucks, have disclosed how they address livestock emissions. Since most of the sector’s methane emissions – and around 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions – stem from livestock, it’s critical that companies include this in their plans.

Oil and gas companies, for their part, should join sector-wide efforts like the United Nations Environment Programme’s Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0, which seeks to improve accuracy and transparency of methane data and track corporate progress. Over 130 businesses globally are participating in this partnership and have committed to report their measurement-based emissions, set a methane reduction target, and submit an implementation plan.

Leverage technology

In both sectors, companies must embrace existing and emerging technologies for the global community to successfully reach its methane reduction goals.

Food companies won’t be able to meet their emissions targets using current agricultural technologies and practices, but livestock emissions could be cut substantially through sustainable changes to farming practices. Companies will have to invest in, and incentivise farmers to adopt, new technologies that are already gaining traction, such as seaweed feed additives for cattle, and other proven and ready-to-deploy methods for curtailing agricultural methane.

To achieve net zero by 2050, methane emissions from fossil fuel operations need to fall by around 75% between 2022 and 2030. That may seem like an enormous task, but oil and gas companies can avoid more than 75% of current emissions using known technology, including replacing methane-emitting equipment with zero-emitting alternatives, with close to 50% of emissions avoidable at no net cost.

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Advocate for new policies

Government policies can create new opportunities and mandates that support sector-wide methane action – and companies need to advocate for them. Ahead of Cop27, 800-plus investors representing nearly $42 trillion assets under management signalled just how essential policies are to reaching a net zero economy when they called on governments to radically increase their climate ambition.

Recently, we have seen new policies open important pathways for funding and advancing lower-emissions agricultural solutions, such as when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration streamlined the process for methane-inhibiting feed additives to gain regulatory approval last month. Before and at Cop28, the European Union adopted more stringent regulations, and Canada proposed robust regulations to significantly reduce oil and gas methane emissions.

With the international climate community’s eyes on methane this week, and 2030 rapidly approaching, it’s time to focus on igniting action where the opportunity – and responsibility – for cutting emissions is the greatest. If food and fossil-fuel companies do not clean up their operations, they will not be able to uphold their climate commitments, nor will we meet our global methane goals.

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But oil, gas and coal producers are still closing their ears. In 2023, they continued spewing near record-high amounts of methane into the atmosphere, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency (IEA) released on Wednesday. That is despite a raft of promises to stop doing so.

Now, however, analysts believe the tide may finally be turning. The introduction of stronger regulations in key fossil fuel-producing and consuming countries, coupled with better monitoring and transparency of harmful leaks, gives them cause for optimism.

“While emissions are still very high, 2024 is going to be a watershed moment on action and transparency on methane,” said Christophe McGlade, head of the IEA’s energy supply unit.

Methane role in 1.5C goal

Methane is a major contributor to global warming. Although it remains in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide, it is 84 times more potent over a 20-year time horizon.

The energy sector represents the second-largest source of methane emissions linked to human activity, after agriculture, and has the biggest potential for reduction, according to analysts.

“If we can’t make real progress in cutting down methane, it is going to be impossible to limit warming to 1.5C,” said McGlade, referring to the most ambitious warming goal in the Paris Agreement.

The IEA estimates that the fossil fuel industry needs to reduce methane emissions 75% by 2030 for the world to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050.

But last year methane emissions from fossil fuels remained near a record high first reached in 2019, rising slightly from 2022 to 120 million tonnes, according to the watchdog. The United States and China are by far the largest emitters of the powerful gas from oil and gas operations and the coal sector respectively.

Leaks from old or poorly maintained infrastructure and the practice of flaring – burning of excess gas – at oil and gas wells are the main energy-sector culprits for putting methane in the atmosphere.

Easy-fix

Reining in those emissions does not require rocket science. The IEA says well-known technologies and measures, such as upgraded equipment and more efficient practices, can cut the bulk of methane generated from fossil fuels in a fast and cheap way.

Just less than half of last year’s emissions could have been avoided at no net cost to the producers, with measures paying for themselves thanks to revenues from the additional gas captured. “It was a massive missed opportunity,” McGlade said.

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If this is such a win-win, it begs the question of why fossil fuel producers are not stepping up to the plate. Lack of awareness over the scale of emissions and longer return on investment from plugging leaks are cited in the report as extenuating circumstances.

For Mark Brownstein, methane expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, up until very recently methane had simply been ignored by the global community as a serious threat.

“Aggressive action on methane is long overdue, but we are unfortunately still at a relatively early stage,” he told Climate Home. “Only now we’re starting to see some coordinated action from companies and countries to address this pollutant.”

Raft of pledges

More than 150 countries have signed up to a commitment first announced at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by the end of this decade.

Last year’s Cop28 in Dubai produced a host of new promises. The Global Stocktake assessment of national climate plans called for countries to substantially cut methane emissions. Meanwhile, more than 50 oil and gas companies pledged to speed up emission reduction efforts.

But for Romain Ioualalen from campaign group Oil Change International, the industry’s words only go so far. “The climate arsonists fuelling climate chaos cannot be trusted to put out the fire,” he said. “Government must take action to force the industry to clean up its mess on its way out the door.”

New regulations are now in the pipeline and provide experts with the biggest hope that things will finally move in the right direction.

Rules and satellites

In December 2023, the United States finalised new rules aimed at cracking down on U.S. oil and gas industry releases of methane. These include measures to eliminate routine flaring and force producers to better monitor leaks from equipment. Neighbouring Canada has also announced a new proposal for beefed-up methane-cutting standards.

Across the ocean, the European Union agreed at the end of last year on a new law that will require companies to report emissions, monitor and fix leaks, and limit flaring. Crucially, the rules will also apply to imports of oil, gas and coal into the bloc, effectively forcing overseas producers to improve their standards.

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Alongside policy developments, the ability to track methane emissions is continuously improving – mainly thanks to satellite technologies – leaving polluters with less room to hide.

Advances on this front are expected to continue in 2024. MethaneSAT, a new satellite developed by EDF, was launched into space in early March and will soon provide free, near-real-time access to methane emissions data from wide areas that have so far been overlooked.

“This data will not only assist in the implementation of regulatory requirements, but it will also underpin the commitments made by fossil fuel companies at Cop28,” said Brownstein. “All of this is finally pointing us in the right direction.”

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Nearly two years on, Climate Home News looks at how these commitments are holding up to the test of time.

• Methane Pledge
• Forest Pledge
• International Fossil Finance Pledge
• Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ)

METHANE PLEDGE

WHAT: Reduce human-made methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030. Cutting the amount of methane present in the atmosphere is important because it is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide despite having a shorter lifespan.

WHO: 104 countries, led by the US and the EU, signed up to the pledge when it was first announced at Cop26 in Glasgow. The number of signatories has since risen to 150. However, they only represent about half of global methane emissions as China, India and Russia – three of the world’s top four emitters – have not joined the coalition.

HOW IT IS GOING: The raw figures paint a fairly grim picture. Since Cop26, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has kept rising fast and it is now more than two and a half times its pre-industrial level.

Over half of the emissions come from human activities, like fossil fuel extraction, farming and landfills, with the rest caused by natural sources. Under current trajectories, total human-made methane emissions could rise by up to 13% between 2020 and 2030 – the pledge’s timeframe.

This graph shows the globally-averaged, monthly atmospheric methane concentration since 1983. Image credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory

Targeting the oil and gas sector is seen by many as the easiest and fastest way to bring down emissions in the near term. Experts say existing technologies already provide cheap and effective ways to plug leaky infrastructure like pipelines and gas storage tanks.

However, the technological developments have not yet been converted into real, widespread action. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), methane emissions from oil and gas remained “stubbornly high” in 2022 even as the energy companies’ bumper profits made actions to reduce them cheaper than ever. “There is just no excuse”, the IEA chief Fatih Birol commented.

Raft of initiatives

But judging the pledge’s progress on current numbers only tells half the story, argued Jonathan Banks, global director of the methane programme at the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). “Emissions are not going to turn around immediately,” he told Climate Home. “If you look at the work going into the pledge, building the funding and technical resources to bring emissions down, I think it could potentially be on track for success”.

A series of initiatives have been set up to help countries deliver on the pledge. The UN’s Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) is helping over 30 developed and developing countries to establish plans to achieve the 2030 target.

Canada has set out a strategy that it expects to reduce domestic methane emissions by “more than 35%” by 2030, compared to 2020.

Methane leaking from Chelmsford compressor station, UK on 15 October 2021, picked up by a special camera (Photo: Clean Air Task Force/ James Turitto)

The Global Methane Hub (GMH), a philanthropic organisation, is also supporting signatories of the methane pledge with technical assistance and funding. Carolina Urmeneta, a director at the GMH, told Climate Home News that over the last year, the group has focused its work on developing systems to monitor methane emissions rates from oil and gas and landfill installations using satellites.

She said reaching the 2030 target “is possible and cost-effective, but it is not easy. We need to improve data transparency and increase funding for projects with methane targets.”

Regulations drive

Some progress has also been made on the regulatory front. The USA introduced new rules to address methane emissions caused by oil and gas companies through the Inflation Reduction Act. Using a carrot-and-stick approach, it provides $1 billion in public subsidies to take action, while charging a fee for excessive emissions.

In May the European Parliament agreed on tougher measures to tackle methane emissions in the energy sector. The approved text calls for binding emission reduction targets, stronger obligations for fossil fuel operators to detect and repair leaky infrastructure and the application of the same measures to exporting countries outside of the bloc.

While the final rules are still being negotiated with the EU’s national governments, CATF’s Banks believes they could have a “huge global impact” if introduced in their current form. “The methane emissions associated with the gas Europe buys from the rest of the world is quite large, so such measures could really drive some change”.

New announcements are expected at Cop28 in Dubai, after the summit’s president Sultan Al Jaber set the phaseout of methane emissions in oil and gas by 2030 as one of his priorities. “More than 20 oil and gas companies have answered Cop28’s call,” he said this week. “And I see positive momentum as more are joining”. But the UAE has been accused of double standards as it failed to report methane emissions to the UN for a decade, as the Guardian reported.

While it has not signed the pledge, China is expected to announce its long-awaited methane plan at Cop28.

FOREST PLEDGE 

WHAT: End and reverse deforestation by 2030. Country leaders pledged to conserve forests, tackle wildfires, facilitate sustainable agriculture, support indigenous populations and “significantly” increase the provision of finance towards achieving those goals.

WHO: More than 140 countries joined the coalition. Signatories of the pledge – including large forest nations like Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo – cover around 90% of the world’s forests. But major G20 powers such as India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and rainforest nations like Bolivia and Venezuela did not join the group.

HOW IT IS GOING:  Countries remain off track to reach the goal of the Glasgow pledge and end deforestation by 2030, according to an assessment done by a coalition of NGOs.

Across the world, tree loss recorded in 2022 was 21% higher than the level needed to be on course to reach zero in seven years’ time, the report said.

Source: Forest Declaration Assessment

In fact, the situation is getting worse. Global deforestation grew 4% last year, wiping out 6.6 million hectares of forest, according to the study. That’s a tree-covered area nearly as big as Ireland disappearing in one year.

“The world’s forests are in crisis. All these promises have been made to halt deforestation, to fund forest protection. But the opportunity to make progress is passing us by year after year,” said Erin Matson, a lead author of the Forest Declaration Assessment.

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There are important regional differences, however. While tropical Asia is faring better, with Indonesia and Malaysia on track to hit their targets, Latin America and the Caribbean are farthest off track.

The election of President Lula da Silva in Brazil has led to a reversal in the skyrocketing deforestation rates in the country, which hosts most of the Amazon rainforets.

But efforts to create a regional forest protection coalition have failed. At the Amazon summit in August, eight South American countries failed to agree on a pledge to end deforestation by 2030 following opposition from Bolivia and Venezuela.

An aerial view shows deforestation near a forest on the border between Amazonia and Cerrado in Nova Xavantina, Mato Grosso state, Brazil in 2021 (REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli)

While it included a larger number of countries, the Cop26 commitment was not entirely new: it repeated promises previously made in the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests, which by then had already failed to achieve some of its core targets.

Keen to avoid the same fate, self-declared “high ambition” countries launched a new initiative designed to deliver the pledge.

“High ambition” efforts

Chaired by the USA and Ghana, the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership (FCLP) has promised to spur global action and provide accountability.

Only a fifth of the original 140 signatories have joined the group so far, with Russia and Indonesia among the most notable absentees.

Christine Dragisic, who leads the forest team at the US State Department, said the goal is to create a “high-level community” that brings together governments, indigenous people, philanthropies, civil society and the private sector to drive action forward and hit the 2030 target.

“Can we do it? Yes. Is it going to be hard? Definitely. Does it require everybody to be at the table? For sure”, Dragisic told Climate Home.

An Indonesian ranger patrols a forest protected through a carbon credit project. Photo: Dita Alangkara/CIFOR

Since its launch last year, the FCLP has worked on a number of initiatives offering technical and financial solutions to forest nations, looking at the role of carbon markets and the forest economy in averting tree loss.

Finance gaps

As with most climate actions, however, it ultimately comes down to the question of money. “The delivery of climate finance is very important to achieve a lot of these targets and that is still very much lacking”, Roselyn Fosuah Adjei, director of climate change at Ghana’s forestry commission and co-chair of the FCLP, told Climate Home.

“The kind of finance we need is not finance for today or tomorrow, it’s finance for yesterday. We are already behind schedule. If it gets delivered fast there’s lots that we can do to close the gap that is now quite wide,” she added.

The Cop26 pledge was accompanied by a commitment from a group of rich nations to provide $12 billion in forest-related climate finance between 2021 and 2025. The money should be channeled to developing countries enacting concrete steps to halt forest loss.

The donor countries reported last year that they had provided $2.6 billion – over a fifth of the target amount – in 2021. They are expected to provide an update at Cop28.

INTERNATIONAL FOSSIL FINANCE PLEDGE

WHAT: End new direct public support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector by the end of 2022, except in limited and clearly defined circumstances that are consistent with a 1.5°C warming limit and the goals of the Paris Agreement.

WHO: 34 countries and five development banks – predominantly from wealthy cuontries – signed up to the pledge at Cop26. These included the G7 nations – with the exception of Japan – and most EU member states.

HOW IT IS GOING: Among the signatories that give lots of money to the energy sector, the vast majority have introduced policies in line with the promise made in Glasgow.

The United Kingdom, France, Denmark, New Zealand, Canada, Finland and Sweden have stopped providing loans and guarantees for oil and gas extraction and processing overseas through their export credit agencies.

Their actions have shifted at least $5.7 billion per year in public finance out of fossil fuels and into clean energy, according to analysis by Oil Change International and E3G.

On the other hand, however, the USA, Italy and Germany have continued funding international fossil fuel projects in 2023 in breach of the pledge.

They were supposed to stop funding foreign fossil fuels by December 2022. But since then, they collectively approved over $3 billion in financial support to oil and gas overseas programmes.

Most of the funding comes in the form of state-backed guarantees provided by export credit agencies. These products limit the risk taken by companies selling services and goods in other countries, influencing investment.

Among the projects receiving backing from the US and Italy was the expansion of an oil refining facility in Indonesia’s Borneo.

The US Export-Import Bank justified its backing of the project by claiming it would allow Indonesia to reduce its reliance on imported fossil fuels. The Italian agency did not provide a motivation for the decision.

Germany and the US have also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into projects aiming to boost the production and trade of liquified natural gas (LNG), which has been more sought after since Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe cut back on Russian gas.

Political splits and carve-outs

In the US, efforts to comply with the Glasgow pledge have caused a split among senior officials in the Biden administration and in the federal agencies charged with disbursing the money, as Politico revealed.

The White House has drafted guidance underpinning the investments - without making it public -, but the final decisions are made by agencies like the US Export-Import Bank (Exim).

“It is a struggle to get US Exim to comply, so far they’ve ignored the Cop26 commitment”, says Nina Pusic from Oil Change International. “It will require a lot of political weight from the Biden administration and Congress.”

Indonesia delays coal closure plans after finance row with rich nations

Italy looks likely to keep funding fossil fuels overseas for years to come. Its policy guidance lays out a "gradual dismission of public support to new requests of fossil fuel projects", seeing support for gas extraction and production run into 2026. Oil processing and distribution projects should be excluded from the beginning of next year.

But Italy has also carved out a wide range of exceptions that allow its export credit agency to keep greenlighting support for fossil fuel projects on "national energy security" and "energy efficiency" grounds.

The FSRU Toscana LNG regasfication platform off the coast of Italy (Photo: OLT Offshore LNG Toscana)

Germany's main export credit agency has just introduced this month new policies restricting support for fossil fuel projects. However, it allows for financing the development of new gas fields and related transport facilities until 2025 when justified by "national security and in compliance with the Paris Agreement targets".

Investment in new coal, oil and gas production is regarded as incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) and a large number of climate scientists.

"Germany has a vast amount of fossil fuel transactions pending approval", says Oil Change International's Pusic. "The success of the new policy will be judged on the decisions made on those projects".

GLASGOW FINANCIAL ALLIANCE FOR NET ZERO (GFANZ)

WHAT: Commit to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest by aligning their portfolios and investment practices with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

WHO: Over 650 institutions across the financial sector, including banks, insurers, asset owners, asset managers, financial service providers, and investment consultants. Gfanz members represent 40% of global private financial assets. They are grouped together under eight independent net-zero financial alliances focused on specific branches of finance.

HOW IT IS GOING: It is not easy to gauge the progress of a wide-ranging initiative with loosely defined targets and a constellation of constituent parts.

GFANZ says it has made progress over the last two years by raising the ambition of financial institutions and by providing tools and guidance to turn commitments into action.

"Two years ago, not a single bank had set a science-based 2030 target. Now nearly all global, systemically important banks have voluntarily and independently set 2030 targets for oil and gas", a GFANZ spokesperson said.

Above all, the mere fact that the alliance still exists at all is a first - albeit limited - marker of success, after an especially tumultuous year.

The prospect of ending up in legal hot waters in the US, where Republicans have driven an anti-climate investment backlash, has dampened the enthusiasm of many leading signatories. The result is that parts of the alliance have been hemorrhaging members, while other components have resorted to watering down their requirements to assuage concerns.

Mark Carney, former Bank of England governor, launched GFANZ at Cop26. Photo: World Economic Forum/Valeriano Di Domenico

Troubles started brewing in mid-2022 when a group of leading US banks threatened to pull out over fears of being sued because of having decarbonisation policies imposed by external parties. That's after US Republican politicians had accused financial institutions of breaching antitrust rules by grouping together in a climate cartel that limits opportunities for investors.

A month later, in October 2022, Gfanz dropped a key requirement for its members to sign up to the UN Race to Zero initiative - a verification body for corporate and financial sector pledges - which had been seen as a way to prevent greenwashing.

GFANZ told Climate Home that the alliances are still working with Race to Zero and "continue to note" its advice and guidance.

Heading for the door

Those US banks eventually ended up staying in but, despite the less stringent criteria, other influential members began heading for the door in droves soon after.

Vanguard, one of the world's biggest asset managers, quit the Net Zero Asset Managers' initiative - part of Gfanz - saying it wanted to "provide clarity to investors" and "speak independently on matters of importance" to them.

But it's the insurers' coalition, known as NZIA, that has suffered the biggest - nearly fatal - wounds. The group has lost nearly two-thirds of its members since the start of the year, with leading firms like Allianz, Zurich, Munich Re and Lloyd's of London throwing in the towel.

Again a major driver for the mass exit was a letter written in May by 23 Republican attorney generals accusing signatories of advancing "an activists climate agenda" with "serious detrimental effects on the residents" of their states. The spark for this was the alliance's initial obligation to its members to set emission reduction targets by the end of July.

Staring at the real prospect of shutting down, the insurers' alliance again watered down its requirements, becoming effectively toothless.

To triple renewable energy, the Global South needs finance

"NZIA member companies have no obligation to set or publish targets", wrote the UN Environment Programme (Unep) - convener of the initiative -  in a clarification letter. "Each company who chooses to be a member of the NZIA unilaterally and independently decides on the steps on its path towards net zero."

Meanwhile, GFANZ says its members have submitted over 300 interim targets "representing clear progress in implementing commitments" to divert finance in line with net zero goals.

But while plans have been announced, many GFANZ members are also being accused of not putting their money where their mouth is. 161 members of the coalition have collectively invested hundreds of billions of dollars into the expansion of the coal, oil and gas industries since they joined the group, according to research by campaigning group Reclaim Finance.

A GFANZ spokesperson said "it’s clear a lot of work still needs to be done to ensure the world is deploying capital consistent with a 1.5C pathway".

"GFANZ is helping to support financial institutions to each set their own sectoral targets and develop transition plans and release guidance on their plan for a managed phaseout of fossil fuels," they added.

The article was amended on 6/11 to add comments from GFANZ received after publication

The post Forests, methane, finance: Where are the Cop26 pledges now? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Europe’s economic relations with Argentina are strong. Despite the geographical distance, EU investment in the country accounts for half of foreign investment. Similarly, the bloc is Argentina’s third-largest trading partner, behind Brazil and China.

While the more comprehensive trade agreement between the EU and its Latin American counterpart, Mercosur, flounders, von der Leyen agreed on a bilateral agreement with Buenos Aires on Monday (17 July). It follows a similar agreement on materials agreed in June.

“Europe and Argentina are partnering for a more secure, sustainable and prosperous world,” she said.

Ahead of elections, Argentina’s leaders wrap fossil fuels in the flag

The non-binding agreement hinges on four key aspects: hydrogen and its derivatives, renewables, energy efficiency, and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

With Russian gas flows into Europe at an all-time low, the two partners committed to “enabling a stable delivery of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Argentine Republic to the European Union.”

Argentina’s export dreams

The 45 million-strong country, which heavily relies on natural gas for its own energy consumption, is a serious player in the gas industry – bolstered by the rich shale gas stemming from Vaca Muerta in the South-West.

To export its fracked riches, Buenos Aires is working on a law to boost its LNG industry – with an eye to begin exporting at scale as early as 2027.

The agreement insists that supplying LNG will be  “consistent with [the EU’s and Argentina’s]  respective long-term decarbonisation objectives and consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

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Likely as a concession to Brussels, the agreement also insists that Argentina tackles its leaky gas wells. In 2022, at least one new gas well was drilled in Vaca Muerta per month.

Meanwhile, the formerly Argentina-based NGO Center for Human Rights and Environment warned in 2018 that at least 5% of produced gas was entering the atmosphere, often due to operators venting surpluses to maintain operational security.

“The Participants endeavour to reduce methane leakages in the fossil gas supply chain to the maximum technically feasible level,” the EU-Argentina agreement stresses, adding that new technologies should help tackle “venting and flaring.”

Both venting and flaring are commonplace methods of ensuring production equipment does not get damaged by too much fossil gas. Given methane’s extreme climate impact, it is 28 times worse than CO2 on a 100-year basis, uncontrolled venting is among the most climate-damaging by-products of producing fossil gas.

The agreement also points to integrating “recovered methane into the supply chain.” Methane that would otherwise leak into the atmosphere can be captured and used regularly. One key source may be landfills, like Norte III in Buenos Aires, which account for about half of the city’s methane emissions.

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Renewable potential

“In large parts of your beautiful country, in the large plateau of the South, you can only hear one sound: this is the sound of the wind, running undisturbed,” explained von der Leyen in June when speaking to business executives.

Argentina has all it takes to become a “renewable energy powerhouse,” she said, adding that “the extraordinary Patagonian winds are a blessing of nature.”

In practice, the EU-Argentina agreement is sparse on the details – aside from a commitment to “facilitate investments necessary to increase energy trade between the Participants.”

European investments are largely expected to come through the European Gateway Initiative, which has a “Team Europe” approach, meaning that EU countries invest under the banner of the bloc.

For example, France and the EU have supported upgrading and bringing the country’s electricity grid up to speed. Other projects include waste and water management support and aid in exploiting the country’s rich mineral resources.

Whether similar initiatives will help fund the country’s nascent LNG infrastructure is unclear.

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The meeting was a gathering of countries who signed the global methane pledge, a Cop26 initiative promising to collectively reduce methane emissions by 30% in 150 countries. China is one of less than 50 nations who have not signed.

Fifteen minutes into the meeting, in a Cop27 side-room in Sharm el-Sheikh, US climate envoy John Kerry tapped the speaker on the arm and pointed off stage, where Xie was entering the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, sorry to interrupt but through the years I have been working very closely with someone who has become a friend of mine and I want to introduce someone who has become a friend of mine – China’s special envoy Xie Zhenhua,” Kerry said.

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As the more than 70 ministers in the room applauded, Kerry passed the microphone to Xie who took off his mask and approached the lectern. The organisers scrambled to find a translator and hurried her by Xie’s side.

“Colleagues you must find it a little bit strange why the Chinese envoy on climate would attend the global methane pledge,” he said, explaining his “good friend” Kerry invited him to attend earlier in the morning.

“Even though I currently have a meeting with German foreign minister, I told her to wait a little bit so I can come and talk to all of you,” he added.

Methane strategy

As previously announced, he said China had a draft methane reduction strategy focussing on the three main sources —energy, farming and waste— and that it was passing through the legislative and administrative process.

He said China has “a little bit of a way to go so we can do surveillance and collect statistics as well as verification of our baseline”.

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Climate talks between the US and China, including on methane emissions, were scheduled to begin in September. But China cancelled the meeting after Democrat congress leader Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.

After US president Joe Biden and China’s president Xi Jinping met at the G20 in Indonesia last week, they agreed to restart some of their formal discussions.

Methane is an invisible gas but can be spotted with special cameras, measuring equipment and satellite. Sources include leaks from oil and gas, landfills and cows and sheep digesting food.

China is the largest emitter of methane in the world, almost doubling runner-up India’s methane emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. Neither are in the Cop26 global methane pledge, which aims to reduce emissions by 30% in 2030.

‘Double act’

Bernice Lee, a climate politics expert at Chatham House told Climate Home it was good that Xie dropped in and “had a publicly cooperative double act” with Kerry.

Lee added there is a draft methane plan which she “hoped” would be released soon. But, she said, it was “concerning that Xie did not mention coal specifically today”.

During the event, Kerry thanked Xie for showing up and reminded him of China’s commitment to work on a plan to address methane emissions. “Hopefully, hopefully in the days ahead, we are going to be able to do that,” he added.

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Norway’s environment minister Espen Barth Eide said Xie’s surprise visit was a “joy” and added that “this is really promising for our overall work not only on methane – which is important enough – but on the global climate cooperation – so that was great news”.

He added that the pledge’s 150 signatories “may be 151 with a rather large one coming along relatively soon”.

Takeshi Akahori, the Japan foreign ministry’s director-general for global issues, said he was happy about Xie’s visit because the East is “very isolated” on tackling methane emissions. “[We] look forward to having China as [a pledge member] around us.”

At the meeting, ministers announced they were launching “pathways” on reducing methane emissions from farming and from waste. A pathway on energy has already been announced.

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At Cop26 last year, over 100 governments said they would collectively reduce emissions of methane, a particularly damaging greenhouse gas, by 30% between 2020 and 2030.

Agriculture is responsible for nearly half of the world’s total human-caused methane emissions. Most of this is from cows and sheep burping.

But, wary of tractor convoys descending on their capitals, governments have largely avoided measures to tackle these emissions.

They’ve chosen instead to focus on the relatively easy target of capturing the methane that is a byproduct of extracting and moving fossil fuels, and the gas that leaks out of rotting landfills.

Nearly twice as many countries have policies to reduce methane emissions from landfills as they do for agriculture, according to World Resources Institute analysis.

More countries have plans to reduce methane emissions from waste and energy than from agriculture. (Photo: World Resources Institute)

The US’s recent inflation reduction act is a good example. It will introduce a methane fee on emissions from oil and gas facilities which does not apply to agriculture. Despite this, Republicans have falsely accused the Biden administration of planning to ration beef consumption and tax cow farts.

Marcelo Mena is CEO of the Global Methane Hub, which was set up in April to implement the methane pledge. He told Climate Home that countries whose methane comes more from fossil fuels should have more ambitious targets than those whose methane comes largely from cows.

“The collective goal is 30%. But that’s a collective goal,” he said. “We expect the major emitters that have a lot more proportionate emissions in the energy sector to do a lot [more].”

‘Burp tax’

One country which is trying to tackle its farming emissions is New Zealand. Nearly 90% of its methane is from cows and sheep and Greenpeace said its previous climate plan had a “cow-shaped hole”.

To fix this hole, its government is proposing a “farm levy”. The media and opposition prefer to call it the “fart tax” or “burp tax”.

This would charge farmers around NZ$3-5 (US$2-3) per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent of the methane they produce. Other New Zealand polluters pay NZ$85 (US$48) a tonne under the emissions trading scheme.

The money would go to research into green farming and rewards for climate-friendly farming methods.

Greenpeace campaigners oppose the plan. Cabinet meeting minutes show even climate change minister James Shaw expressed concerns it was not ambitious enough and unfairly let off the livestock industry.

Yet cattle ranchers are up in arms. New Zealand’s biggest farmers association said it would force farmers to sell up and  “rip the guts out of small town New Zealand, putting trees where farms used to be”.

A right-wing group called Groundswell mobilised 50 farmer protests around the country last Thursday – although turnout was smaller than expected.

Agriculture, mostly cows and sheep, is the biggest sources of man-made (dark blue) methane emissions. (Photo: IEA)

This controversy has reached across to Australia, where the government has become the latest to join the global methane pledge, despite preemptive agricultural lobbying.

A leading farmers group in the Australian state of New South Wales said “it is opposed to Australia signing up to a global ‘methane pledge’ that is killing small towns [in New Zealand]”. The “burp tax” has yet to be introduce in New Zealand.

Australian opposition politicians have claimed that signing the pledge will lead to “shooting cattle”, “T-bone tax” and the end of the Australian barbecue.

On the defensive, Australia’s agriculture minister Murray Watt said he wouldn’t implement a New Zealand style tax. Climate minister Chris Bowen said the pledge’s target was just an “aspirational goal”.

We heard warnings about an end to the Aussie barbeque, a T-bone tax and so on if Australia joins 120 other countries in signing a pledge to reduce methane emissions.

But for rhetorical flourish – no one was ever going to outdo Barnaby Joyce.#Insiders #auspol pic.twitter.com/ZHYkbS0HJ2

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) October 15, 2022

Even Rob McCreath, from the lobby group Farmers for Climate Action, told the ABC that agriculture “shouldn’t be sucked into” methane cuts, which should focus on the oil and gas sector.

Where livestock lobbyists and governments accept that action is needed, they prefer technological solutions to curbs on meat consumption and headcount of farm animals.

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Mena agreed that while reducing meat consumption is part of the answer, “sustainable beef” is possible.

He touted “methane inhibitors”. Feed additives from seaweed or fats and oils can reduce the amount of methane cattle produce. It’s easier to add these to the cows’ diet if they eat from a trough than if they’re free-ranging.

The Global Methane Hub is working directly with major beef producers like Argentina, Uruguay and Chile on their methane-cutting plans, Mena said.

Plugging leaks

Emissions from oil and gas are easier – if not easy – to reduce as doing so can make fossil fuel companies money.

Methane leaks from oil and gas pipelines and is deliberately vented or flared as a waste product. Companies allow it to escape because they either don’t know it is leaking, don’t know how to fix it or they think fixing it will cost them more than it saves.

By providing technological know-how, like satellites or video cameras that can monitor leaks, oil and gas companies can reduce their emissions and capture methane to sell to their customers as gas. Burning methane for power produces less greenhouse gas emissions than letting it leak into the atmosphere unburned.

But technology will not be enough, Mena said, calling for regulations and carbon pricing. “The economic case [for capturing and selling wasted methane] does not outweigh the short term profits that the oil and gas sector is focusing on today at the expense of the environment.”

Governments have launched several diplomatic initiatives to promote action to reduce methane from oil and gas production. None of these propose reducing oil and gas production itself.

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The US-led “net zero producers forum” launched in April 2021 but took nearly a year to convene its first meeting and has achieved little.

At the major economies forum in June, the US and EU pushed for a joint initiative on reducing methane from oil and gas. They are expected to push this further at the Cop27 climate talks.

Mena hinted that Cop27 will also see announcements on whether methane pledge signatories’ individual methane targets add up to 30% collectively.

Mena said organisations like the International Methane Emissions Observatory, Climate and Clean Air Coalition and Global Methane Pledge secretariat can help with that.

Targets are little use without effective monitoring and Mena said that there will be “major developments on making use of satellite information for accountability” at Cop27.

An NGO called Carbon Mapper has announced plans to send a Nasa jet to monitor methane emissions over sites like landfills and oil and gas pipelines in Latin America by February.

Satellites have already revealed that landfills are responsible for up to 50% of some countries’ methane emissions and that methane emissions from Arabian Gulf states are nearly ten times greater than reported.

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After hold-out Senator Joe Manchin agreed to it, the Inflation Reduction Act looks set to become law, introducing $370 billion of climate spending.

The bill would introduce a “waste emissions charge”, making companies who produce, transport or store oil and gas pay for methane which leaks from their facilities into the atmosphere.

Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas and frequently leaks from oil and gas pipelines as a waste product. Companies have allowed it to leak because they either don’t know about it or they think fixing it will cost them more than it saves.

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Methane has risen up the climate agenda in recent years. A report last year by IPCC scientists said “strong, rapid and sustained reductions” in methane emissions were needed and the US and EU persuaded over 100 countries to sign a “global methane pledge” at Cop26.

Brian Prest, an economist at Resources for the Future, told Climate Home that the fee, which will rise to $1,500 a tonne by 2026, will reduce methane leakage from its current rate of 1.9% to somewhere between 0.4% and 1.1%.

“That’s a big reduction right?”, he said, although whether it’s 0.4% or 1.1% will depend on how accurately methane emissions are measured.

Several studies conducted with satellites, helicopters and specialist recording equipment suggest that methane emissions from oil and gas facilities are far higher than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), using companies’ self-reported data, estimates.

At first, the methane fee will be based on the lowest of the EPA’s estimates, known as the greenhouse gas reporting programme. The EPA uses reports from oil and gas companies about operations at their facilities and then uses that to estimate the total emissions. A 2018 study in Science magazine suggested that the real figures were about four times as high as these figures.

So using that method “is not great”, says Prest. But the bill addresses this by saying that within two years the EPA administrator shall revise the “requirements… to ensure the reporting… are based on empirical data… [and] accurately reflect the total methane emissions and waste emissions”.

Global hub launched to help countries slash methane emissions

Despite false claims from some Republicans, the fee will not apply to sources of methane other than oil and gas, like livestock or landfills. Oil and gas companies will be exempt if they comply with EPA regulations which are being drawn up now and are likely to focus on forcing companies to install certain technologies.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the fee will raise $6bn over ten years, according to EE News. This money will not be earmarked for anything in particular. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse earlier proposed it should be dedicated to coastal resilience projects.

Prest has estimated that the fee will increase the costs of producing natural gas by around 3-9 cents per million units of energy (MMBtu) and raise the gas price by 1-7 cents. The cost of natural gas is currently around 770 cents per MMBtu.

Prest and Jonathan Banks, global director of super pollutants at the Clean Air Task Force, both told Climate Home that they were unaware of any similar fees in other countries – although Norway has a nitrogen oxide fee.

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Both the US and Norway are members of a US-led “Net Zero Producers Forum” for oil and gas producing nations who want to reduce emissions. The other members are Canada, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Banks said the fee “could be repeated elsewhere [in the world]”. But, he said, “the key is to layer it on other regulations. The fee will apply to all sources until the regulations go in place and then to sources outside of the regulations which is important. I don’t think you get the kinds of reductions we need with just a fee.”

The bill has to pass both houses of Congress and be signed off by the President before it becomes law. This is expected in the next few weeks, although the Democrats’ Senate majority could be threatened by the absence of any senators due to illness or by Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has been sceptical of green spending in the past.

This article was amended on 29 July to clarify that companies report to the EPA on their operations at their facilities rather than their leaks directly

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The project uses methane released during the coal mining operation to generate 120MW of electricity. Since 60% of this coal gas has a concentration of 3-8% methane, it makes these sort of initiatives profitable.

“The challenge is to deal with the remaining 40% of low methane concentration coal gas,” said Yang Fuqiang, a senior researcher at Climate Change and Energy Transition Programme at Peking University in Beijing.

China’s energy sector, driven by its coal operations, accounted for a fifth of total methane emissions from the global energy sector last year – making it, by far, the largest methane emitter.

The government has introduced strong policies to prevent the direct release of methane into the atmosphere. But it is struggling to motivate coal mining giants to initiate methane mitigation projects.

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In 2008, China made it mandatory for coal mining companies to capture and utilise coal mine methane above 30% concentration.

Companies that cannot capture high-density methane from coal have to flare the gas to prevent its release into the atmosphere. The government further introduced incentives for methane recovery.

But industry insiders say that a lack of monitoring of methane emissions coupled with the high cost of capture technologies deter the development of more methane-cutting projects.

Detecting methane emissions requires tracking on the ground and from the sky using drones, planes and satellites. These monitoring systems alone are costly and need huge investment.

“The data uncertainty of methane emissions is a long-existing problem,” said Ran Ze, senior manager at Environmental Defense Fund, China (EDF). “It’s crucial to enhance monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) to detect the exact status of methane emissions.”

Global hub launched to help countries slash methane emissions

The US-China joint declaration announced at Cop26 in Glasgow, UK and China’s pledge to become carbon neutral by 2060 have prompted policymakers to bolster efforts to capture methane and increase its share in the country’s energy mix.

Cutting methane emissions from the energy sector, which has a warming potential 80 times that of carbon dioxide, is increasingly seen as a quick win. At Cop26, more than 108 countries signed up to reduce its emissions under an initiative launched jointly by the US and the EU.

China stayed away from the initiative but, in its joint declaration with the US, committed to work towards limiting its methane emissions.

According to official data from 2014, the country’s energy sector contributed 24.7 million tonnes or 45% of national methane emissions. Coal mines alone were responsible for around 38% of emissions – unlike in the US and the EU where a majority of methane emissions come from gas pipelines.

“If China wants to tap the potential of methane and curb its emissions, then undoubtedly coal mines are a priority area,” said Yang.

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China is expected to release a national action plan for cutting methane emissions ahead of the Cop27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November.

The success of China’s methane emission reduction policies hinges on a comprehensive approach.

Besides monitoring, coal mining companies will need cost-effective technologies for methane mitigation, according to EDF. There are ways to recover coal mine methane with a concentration as low as 0.5%, but they are expensive.

And with China planning to drastically cut down coal extraction as a part of its pledge to become carbon neutral by 2060, mining companies only have 38 years to recover their cost from investments.

While the government is likely to invest in methane monitoring, reporting and verification, mining companies will face the uphill task of finding low-cost methane mitigation technology.

“Methane concentration varies in coal mines here,” said Meian Chen, programme director at innovative Green Development Program, Beijing.  “For this, there will be a need for a tailored approach, using cost-effective technologies and policy support, to capture methane from these mines.”

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Set up with $340 million of philanthropic funding, the Global Methane Hub will offer grants and technical support to implement the Global Methane Pledge.

Launched by the US and EU at Cop26 climate talks in November, 110 countries have signed up to the pledge to date, committing to collectively reduce their methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030. That is roughly in line with what is needed to keep a 1.5C warming limit within reach, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report on Monday.

Marcelo Mena, the former environment minister of Chile and director of the Climate Action Center at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, will lead the hub.

The first $10 million of funds is earmarked for the UN’s Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), which will work with 30 developed and developing countries to establish plans over the next three years to achieve the 2030 target.

“We’ll be helping all countries who’d like to develop national methane reduction plans, sharing the scientific, technical and regulatory expertise,” Drew Shindell, CCAC’s special advisor for action on methane, told Climate Home News. 

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Methane contributes significantly to global warming. Although it only stays in the atmosphere for around nine years, methane has a warming impact 84 times that of CO2 over a 20-year period. 

A paper in Environmental Research Letters last year found an all-out, rapid effort to slash methane emissions could slow the rate of current warming by 30% and avoid 0.5C of warming by the end of the century. 

Tackling methane provides a “short-term climate win,” Shindell said. “Actions to reduce it can rapidly slow warming whereas decarbonisation provides needed long-term, but not near-term, climate relief.”

The aim is for all these countries to set specific methane targets in their national climate plans, in updates ahead of Cop27 in Egypt this year, Mena told Climate Home News. 

“The quick wins are in the oil and gas sector,” Mena said, while emissions from farming and waste also need attention.

The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using existing technology, according to the International Energy Agency. And it need not be expensive: the IPCC estimates 50-80% of methane emissions from fossil fuel operations could be slashed at a cost of less than $50 per tonne of CO2 equivalent.

“Inaction on methane is not a technology or science problem, it is very much a political and organisational problem,” said energy analyst Poppy Kalesi. 

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Rubbish tips are an enormous problem and must be addressed, Mena said. Satellite images show that landfill sites in the US have been leaking methane at rates as much as six times higher than estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

The other major source of methane emissions, responsible for almost 40%, is farming. A cow produces an average of 250-500 litres of methane a day from digesting grass.

The IPCC report said that behaviour and lifestyle changes, such as reducing meat consumption and shifting to plant-based diets, are an important part of the solution. 

“We have a food system that is not healthy for people or the planet,” said Mena. “We need to build the groundwork for transformational change in our food system.” 

Better livestock manure management and changing the diet of livestock could help curb methane emissions from agriculture. There are a host of methane-busting products being trialed, ranging from laboratory-made probiotics to natural additives such as seaweed and charcoal.

Research from the University of California, Davis, for example, has found that feeding seaweed to cows significantly reduced the amount of methane from their burps and farts.

“We need to tackle the neglected sectors of waste management and the food system to reduce methane emissions,” said Mena. 

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The initiative has been led by the United States and the European Union and commits countries to cut down on emissions from methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.

Launching the pledge, European Commission president Ursula Von Der Leyen said: “Cutting back on methane emissions is one of the most effective things we can do… to keep to 1.5C. It is the lowest hanging fruit.”

She and US president Joe Biden stressed the non-climate benefits of reducing methane emissions too. Methane pollution contributes to asthma and other breathing problems and reduces crop yields, leading to poverty and hunger.

Vietnam’s president Nguyen Xuan Phuc called on rich countries to support developing ones in reducing methane emissions by giving finance and sharing technology and expertise.

He said: “This will enable developing poor countries to join in the reduction of methane emission in an effective way, thus contributing to the protection of our planet for a green, safe and sustainable earth.”

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While most developed economies and many developing ones signed up for the pledge, big polluters including China, India, Russia, Australia, Turkey and South Africa did not.

Australia’s decision not to sign is thought to be a concession to the junior coalition partner in government. The National Party’s leader has said a 30% reduction in methane emissions would devastate the beef, feedlot, dairy and coal mining industries.

Methane escapes into the atmosphere in various ways including the process of producing coal, oil and gas; from landfills and from agriculture.

In its latest major climate science report in August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted that methane levels in the air were at their highest level in 800,000 years.

Activists have used infrared cameras and methane monitors in recent years to show that methane emissions from oil and gas installations go widely underreported, calling for tighter regulation.

Campaigners welcomed the widespread adoption of the pledge. Dave Jones of think-tank Ember said: “The Global Methane Pledge is a game changing moment – it shows that the world is waking up to methane’s staggering climate impact.”

Ember analysis found that methane leaks from the world’s coal mines alone have a short-term warming impact greater than the entire EU’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Jones said: “For countries to cut as much methane as possible, they must target all sources. Coal mine methane is fairly quick and cheap to do something about and a massive contributor to global heating.”

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Ani Dasgupta, CEO of the World Resources Institute said the move “can make a real difference”. He said: “Never before have countries come together to tackle this key part of the climate puzzle.”

He added: “The next step is for countries to put the pledge in motion with serious policies across agriculture, energy and waste. Solutions to tackle methane are readily available, cost-effective and bring wins for climate and development.”

But others said that countries should phase out fossil fuel production rather than just making the process cleaner. Earthworks thermographer Sharon Wilson said “the era of ever expanding oil and gas must stop”.

Methane from oil and gas production can be reduced by leak detection and repair and by capturing the gas to use as fuel rather than treating it as a waste product.

The US Environmental Protection Agency opened a public consultation on Tuesday on new rules to curb methane emissions from the oil and gas industry.

Some campaigners said Biden needed to go further and phase out fossil fuel production.

“We’re out of time to tinker around the edges on climate,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If Biden wants to be a true climate leader, he needs to set a near-zero methane leakage rate and end new oil and gas project approvals.”

Other ways to cut methane include capturing emissions from landfill sites to burn for electricity and changing the diet of cattle or reducing the headcount.

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On Friday, the US and EU made a joint pledge to slash methane emissions, which are mainly released from abandoned coal mines, oil and gas operations, and farming, by 2030 and encouraged other nations to do the same.

Although it only stays in the atmosphere for around nine years, methane has a warming impact 84 times that of CO2 over a 20-year period. It is responsible for almost a quarter of global warming to date.

At the Major Economies Forum on Friday, US president Joe Biden called on leaders to tackle the issue. “This will not only rapidly reduce the rate of global warming, but it will also produce a very valuable side benefit, like improving public health and agricultural output,” he told the assembled premiers.

“We believe the collective goal is both ambitious but realistic, and we urge you to join us in announcing this pledge at Cop26,” he said, referring to the UN climate summit in Glasgow, UK in November.

Of those in attendance, the UK, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico and Argentina signed up, while Australia, Japan and South Korea stayed silent. Ghana and Iraq added their names to the alliance over the weekend. The countries that have signed up include six of the top 15 methane emitters and account for one-fifth of global methane emissions, the White House said in a statement.

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Despite its global warming impact, tackling methane has received far less political attention than carbon dioxide emissions. The pact, backed up by the EU’s methane strategy and Biden reinstating methane rules in the US, signals that this is starting to change.

“World leaders are waking up to the fact that methane presents a quick win against climate change,” Jill Duggan, executive director of EDF Europe, told Climate Home News. “With public demand for climate action higher than ever, this pledge presents a clear, tangible target that countries obviously feel is attainable.”

According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “strong, rapid and sustained reductions” in methane emissions are needed, in addition to CO2 reductions, to keep 1.5C within reach.

Methane levels in the air are now higher than at any point in the past 800,000 years and are tracking close to the high emission scenarios outlined in the IPCC’s previous assessment in 2013.

The methane pledge is in line with IPCC recommendations that methane and black carbon reductions of 35% or more are needed by 2050, compared to 2010 levels, to limit global warming to 1.5C.

IPCC report prompts calls to tackle methane emissions at Cop26

A paper in Environmental Research Letters earlier this year found an all-out effort to slash methane emissions could slow the rate of temperature rise by 30% and avoid 0.5C of warming by the end of the century.

Using existing technology, the oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

Energy analyst Poppy Kalesi said that oil and gas portfolio managers do not see financial incentives to curb methane emissions from their pipelines, without stricter regulations. “Large consumer markets are designed to reward producers that deliver large volumes at low prices, not emissions reductions,” she told Climate Home.

Kalesi warned that without reliable monitoring and reporting in place, it would be difficult to track progress towards the 2030 goal.

Campaigners armed with satellite observations and infrared cameras have shown that the scale of “fugitive emissions” of methane from oil and gas installations is widely underreported. While the EU, for one, is introducing stricter standards for monitoring and reporting emissions under its methane strategy, it will take time for this to result in better data.

“We have no access to accurate data and I don’t expect the world to have access to this before 2026-2030,” Kalesi said. “There is currently no consensus in terms of the baseline and measurement methods.”

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In fossil fuel sectors, while the data is murky, the technological solutions are clear. In farming, responsible for more methane emissions than coal, oil and gas industries put together, there are fewer quick fixes.

“In the agriculture space, there are existing technologies and practices that can be utilized to get emission reductions, but not on the order of what can be readily cut from oil and gas as well as coal,” said Jonathan Banks of Clean Air Task Force.

Biden’s agriculture department is working with farmers to improve practices on a voluntary basis, according to the White House press release.

A more culturally sensitive solution is for people to eat less meat, particularly from ruminants like cattle, goats and sheep that belch methane.

The Humane Society of the US argues technologies “do little to address the problems inherent in industrial animal agriculture”. “A better strategy – for the environment, climate change mitigation, human health, and animal welfare – is reducing our overall consumption of animal products and making more climate-friendly food choices,” it says.

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The IPCC found methane levels in the air are now higher than at any point in the past 800,000 years and are tracking close to the high emission scenarios outlined in its previous assessment in 2013.

Although the gas only stays in the atmosphere for around nine years, methane, which is mainly released from abandoned coal mines, farming and oil and gas operations, has a warming impact 84 times that of CO2 over a 20-year period. It is responsible for almost a quarter of global warming.

“Strong, rapid and sustained reductions” in methane emissions are needed in addition to slashing CO2 in the next two decades, scientists concluded, to keep a 1.5C warming limit within reach – the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.

“The new IPCC report is a call for action on methane,” Daniel Zavala-Araiza, senior scientist with Environmental Defense Fund, told Climate Home News. “Hopefully Cop26 will show that methane is becoming a key priority at both national and sub-national level,” referring to the climate summit in Glasgow, UK this November.

Cop26 president Alok Sharma has methane on his list of issues to address at the summit. But more recently UK prime minister Boris Johnson boiled down the priorities to “coal, cars, cash and trees,” suggesting it may not be top of the agenda.

Five takeaways from the IPCC’s 2021 climate science report

A lack of effective policy to tackle methane stems from patchy monitoring and reporting. “Measuring methane is still a work in progress and far from global practice,” energy analyst Poppy Kalesi told Climate Home News.

Many governments and companies see methane gas as a “transition fuel” away from coal, as it emits less CO2 when burned for power generation or heating. Yet methane leaks in the process risk undermining that carbon saving.

Recent studies have shown that methane emissions from oil and gas production are often much higher than previously assumed. An investigation by the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) earlier this year found that methane leakage from oil and gas infrastructure across Europe was endemic.

Proper maintenance and plumbing of oil and gas pipelines to prevent leaks is needed to curb methane emissions, Sarah Smith, programme director of super pollutants at CATF, told Climate Home News.

“Since methane is the only clear strategy to substantially cut warming over the next 20 years, world leaders must come together and pledge swift and sizeable reductions. This is an opportunity that can’t be missed,” said Smith.

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A paper in Environmental Research Letters earlier this year found an all-out, rapid effort to slash methane emissions could slow the rate of current warming by 30% and avoid 0.5C of warming by the end of the century. 

The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using existing technology, according to the International Energy Agency. 

The other major source of methane emissions, responsible for almost 40%, is farming. 

Preventing the burning of crop residues, better livestock manure management and changing the diet of livestock could help curb methane emissions from agriculture, according to Smith.

Cows produce an average of 250-500 litres of methane a day from digesting grass. Research from the University of California, Davis, found that feeding seaweed to cows significantly reduced the amount of methane from their burps and farts. A more contentious solution is for meat eaters to adopt plant-based diets.

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According to analysis by CATF, most countries refer to methane in their climate plans, but just 13 countries have included methane reduction targets in their latest pledges to the Paris Agreement.

Nigeria has committed to ending emissions from gas flaring, which outstrip all emissions from transport and electricity, by 2030 in its updated climate plan. 

The European Commission has developed a methane strategy, proposing laws to require companies to monitor methane emissions and report and repair leaks.

In March, the EU and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) set up the International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) to monitor companies’ emissions using company data, satellite technology and scientific studies.

“Oil and gas methane is the cheapest and easiest to abate and European states are major purchasers globally. The EU could set a standard for the rest of the world to follow while cheaply addressing a major source of warming now,” Jill Duggan, executive director of EDF Europe, told Climate Home News.

Kalesi said that meaningful EU action on methane is unlikely to kick in before 2027 due to the legislation timeline and a lack of satellite data. “If legislation is adopted in 2023, it will take a couple of years before member states’ authorities are able to implement and enforce [regulations],” she said.

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In the US, political swings have delayed progress. Former president Barack Obama introduced methane regulations, only for Donald Trump to roll them back. President Joe Biden has directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reinstate the rules by September. 

Some campaigners and politicians have called for a global agreement on methane, similar to the Montreal Protocol which was drawn up in 1987 to phase out ozone-depleting substances.

But Kalesi said that it is more difficult to build support for methane reduction. The ozone issue was “emotional, [but] methane remains a very technical, scientific issue,” she said. “The human dynamic element is completely missing. Science in and of itself hardly ever brings change.”

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Pemex said a lightning storm ignited a gas leak from an underwater pipeline. “There was no oil spill and the immediate action taken to control the surface fire avoided environmental damage,” the company said in a statement.

Campaigners disagree, demanding an investigation into the environmental and climate damage caused by the fire. But with little faith in the Mexican authorities, they are looking to regional allies to hold Pemex to account.

Greenpeace Mexico accused Pemex, the state-owned company operating the pipeline, of causing “ecocide” in the Gulf of Mexico, citing the toxic properties and climate impact of methane gas. It blamed the rupture on ageing, poorly maintained infrastructure.

Pablo Ramirez, an energy and climate campaigner for Greenpeace Mexico, told Climate Home News that it was impossible to calculate the carbon footprint of the gas leak because there is no public information about the amount of gas usually transported by the pipeline. He described the lack of transparency in Mexico’s energy sector as “very problematic”.

Lorne Stockman, senior research analyst at Oil Change International, said the pipeline could have been leaking for a while before the gas caught fire. The global heating impact of methane is 84 time higher over 20 years than that of carbon dioxide, which is produced when it is burned. “Until and unless we get more information from Pemex, we won’t know how bad this was,” he said.

“This is just the latest example of how the oil and gas industry pollutes with impunity, and why we must work to shut it down as soon as possible,” said Stockman. “If this gas had not caught fire and caused this visual spectacle, most people would not have heard about it… But it’s clear that we cannot end the fossil fuel age quickly enough to mitigate the damage it is causing.”

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At a local level, Greenpeace raised concerns about the harm leaked methane could have caused to marine life. 

“The gas can rapidly penetrate the bodies of fish, doing direct damage to gills, skin, chemoreceptors and eyes, and filling up the gas bladder, making the fish unable to control its buoyancy,” Ramirez said. “Shellfish are also killed by exposure to gas.”

If fish are exposed to gas concentrations of 1 mg per litre they show signs of acute poisoning within 20 minutes and die within two days, he added.

Shocking footage of the enormous fireball, dubbed “eye of the fire”, sparked international criticism on social media, including from youth activist Greta Thunberg. 

“Meanwhile the people in power call themselves ‘climate leaders’ as they open up new oilfields, pipelines and coal power plants – granting new oil licenses exploring future oil drilling sites. This is the world they are leaving for us,” she wrote on Twitter.  

Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has bet heavily on the fossil fuel industry, describing oil as “the best business in the world.” He has dismissed renewable energy sources, referring to wind turbines as “visual pollution.”

The head of Mexico’s oil and gas safety regulator ASEA, Angel Carrizales, tweeted that the incident “did not generate any spillage”.

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Energy analyst Poppy Kalesi told Climate Home News that it was unlikely that Pemex would be held accountable by Obrador’s government or ASEA. 

Mexico has one of the most comprehensive regulatory frameworks for methane emissions on paper, but in practice it remains difficult to implement, Kalesi said. “ASEA has neither the authority nor the competence or capacity to conduct environmental audits on Pemex’s platforms and equipment.”

As a state-owned company with close ties to the government and without investor pressure, Pemex has no interest in building up competence to evaluate its methane performance, she added. 

Kalesi said the US and Canada could exert pressure on the Mexican government to hold Pemex accountable under the 2016 “three amigos” energy deal, in which the three countries pledge to produce 50% of their power by 2025 from renewable energy sources. 

“What the US and Canada can and should do is to use both their purchasing power and political pressure to give a hook to the Mexican government to hold Pemex accountable,” Kalesi said.

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Using infrared cameras, Clean Air Task Force (CATF) documented over 120 examples of methane emissions leaking or venting from oil and gas operations in seven European countries.

The US-based think tank described it as a “massive, under-regulated crisis”. It is not a case of a few rogue pipeline operators, said James Turitto, a campaign manager for CATF who gathered evidence in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic and Austria: no part of the industry is clean.

“We’ve all been shocked by just how pervasive methane emissions are across Europe,” said  Turitto. “I’ve been able to find multiple leaks in every country I’ve visited. It begs the question – why aren’t the companies and national regulators doing this already?”

Infrared cameras show methane gas leaking from infrastructure in Mallnow, Germany. Photo: Clean Air Task Force

Methane, which is released into the atmosphere from abandoned coal mines, farming and oil and gas operations, has a global warming impact 84 times higher than CO2 over a 20-year period. It accounts for 25% of global warming from human activities, according to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Despite lockdown restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, methane levels in the air surged last year.

Methane leaks occur when seals and flanges on pipelines and other equipment wear down. Sometimes methane is burned or deliberately released by oil and gas companies that do not consider it profitable to sell or transport the gas. Regular monitoring and inspection of facilities could reduce the frequency of leaks and cut emissions. 

The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using existing technology, according to the International Energy Agency. 

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“We’re essentially talking about proper maintenance and plumbing. Oil and gas companies don’t do the basics because, frankly, they don’t have to, so they’d rather spend the money elsewhere,”  said CATF methane director Jonathan Banks.

“The real problem is that there is basically no regulation of methane emissions in Europe, so companies can ‘self-report’ whatever they want with impunity,” Rowan Emslie from CATF told Climate Home News. “Most countries don’t have anybody to inspect facilities in order to check reported emissions.”

A methane plume is detected by infrared cameras in Minerbio, Italy. Photo: Clean Air Task Force

There is no uniform, EU-wide system for reporting methane emissions – each country has its own system, energy analyst Poppy Kalesi told Climate Home News. “We have no way of knowing if EU countries are underreporting their methane emissions.”

The industry commonly pitches gas as a “transition fuel” to a cleaner economy, as it emits roughly half the carbon dioxide as coal when burned. Fugitive methane emissions undermine this case, said Lisa Fischer, an analyst at think tank E3G.

“A methane leakage rate of as little as 2.7% would make gas worse than coal in emissions terms – we have thousands of pipeline kms in Europe but so far no systematic reporting by the industry to demonstrate that they are below this threshold or have credible plans to cut this to near zero.”

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In March, the EU and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) set up the International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) to monitor companies’ emissions using company data, satellite technology and scientific studies.

UNEP’s global methane assessment in May said global methane emissions must fall at least 40% by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5C. According to the EU Commission, European countries cannot meet their climate goals without significantly reducing their methane emissions. 

The Commission will release its final methane strategy later this year, which could pave the way for legislation tackling emissions. It previously said it is considering imposing binding methane emissions standards on oil and gas imports and introducing legislation requiring fossil fuel companies to report and repair methane leaks. 

European lawmaker Martin Hojsík, who serves as shadow rapporteur on the methane strategy, said voluntary commitments “do not reflect the size of the climate crisis and will not lead to the necessary emission cuts”. 

“We have to contribute to emissions reductions by applying standards to imports, by banning routine venting and flaring and by supporting a global methane agreement,” he said.

The post Infrared images show under-regulated ‘methane crisis’ across Europe appeared first on Climate Home News.

Increasingly frequent methane releases from venting, flaring or leakage along two major gas pipelines came despite an estimated 14% drop in exports to Europe.

Analysis firm Kayrros detected 13 methane emission events around the Yamal-Europe pipeline – a 4,196 km pipeline running through Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany – and a further 33 around the Brotherhood pipeline, 2,750-km long gas pipeline through Russia, Ukraine and Slovakia.

Operators told Kayrros these methane releases were related to planned maintenance and had been reported to the relevant authorities.

Analysts said a number of factors could have contributed to the spike in methane emissions over Russia, including a drop in oil and gas prices and a lack of maintenance of gas pipelines during the pandemic. 

“With oil prices slumping to historic lows in 2020, this places additional financial pressure on producers, potentially leading to reduced maintenance and repairs on equipment, and flare monitoring, all of which could lead to higher levels of venting,” Ryan Wilson, an energy policy analyst at Climate Analytics, told Climate Home News. 

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Falling oil and gas prices often go hand in hand with an increase of flaring and venting, which involve burning methane or directly releasing the potent gas into the atmosphere, said Jonathan Banks, senior policy advisor at the US-based Clean Air Task Force. “We have seen this in south Texas.” 

Methane, which is released into the atmosphere from abandoned coal mines, farming and oil and gas operations, has a global warming impact 84 times higher than CO2 over a 20-year period. It accounts for 25% of global warming emissions from human activities, according to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in January that Russia is the world’s largest methane emitter. Last year the country produced 13,953 kt of methane emissions, almost 20% of the 70 Mt of methane released into the atmosphere worldwide last year. After Russia, the biggest emitters were the US, Iran and Turkmenistan. 

“We have no chance of meeting our climate targets or targets for decarbonisation if we don’t start to deal with methane emissions in countries that produce large amounts of oil and gas like Russia,” Banks told Climate Home News.

Methane emission hotspots detected by Kayrros along the Yamal-Europe and Brotherhood gas pipelines in Russia. (Image: Kayrros)

The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using existing technology, according to the IEA. 

In 2012, Russia started fining companies that flared more than 5% of gas they produced, according to Wilson. But there are no regulations in place to reduce leaks from natural gas compressors and pneumatic devices into the atmosphere, he said.

“Considering global reports and accounts of Russia’s performance though, such policies do not appear to be effective – the problem is only getting worse,” Poppy Kalesi, director of global energy at EDF, told Climate Home.

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As the world’s largest importer of gas, the EU plays a major role in influencing the climate policies of other countries. Analysts say that to date the EU has done little to pressure Russia to curb its methane emissions.

“What the European Commission proposes is to use soft power measures to raise awareness and secure a collaborative approach. And this is not enough,” said Kalesi. “The EU should in the very least agree on a minimum methane performance standards and taxes or levies on all EU gas buyers who fail to procure compliant gas.”

The EU Commission said last year that it was considering imposing binding methane emissions standards on oil and gas imports and introducing legislation requiring fossil fuel companies to report and repair methane leaks. 

Wilson said that the introduction of binding standards would “force Russia to ensure it is accurately quantifying its methane emissions and implement measures to meet such standards”.

The post Methane emissions from Russian pipelines surged during the coronavirus pandemic appeared first on Climate Home News.

In its methane strategy published on Wednesday, the European Commission declared a commitment to tackling emissions from methane, which is the second-largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide.

“The Commission will examine options as regards possible methane emission reduction targets or standards or other incentives on fossil energy consumed and imported in the EU in the absence of significant commitments from international partners,” the strategy states. 

EU standards would put pressure on suppliers like Russia, Algeria and Gulf states to take methane emissions seriously. That could significantly impact global methane emissions, as the EU is the world’s largest importer of fossil gas.

Methane, which is released into the atmosphere from abandoned coal mines, farming and leaky oil and gas pipes, has a global warming impact 84 times higher than CO2 over a 20-year period.

The Commission said it planned to introduce legislation requiring oil and gas companies to report methane emissions and repair leaks. It will consider banning flaring and venting, which involve burning methane or directly releasing the potent gas into the atmosphere.

“The Commission will deliver legislative proposals in 2021 on compulsory measurement, reporting, and verification for all energy-related methane emissions and on an obligation to improve leak detection and repair of leaks on all fossil gas infrastructure,” a statement read.

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The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using current technology, according to the International Energy Agency. 

Methane emissions are rising rapidly, with new satellite data from technology company Kayrros revealing that large leaks have increased by 32% in the past year. According to Kayrros, there are around 100 high-volume leaks happening around the world at any one time. Half of these methane hotspots occur in regions with coal mining and oil and gas industries. One of the worst culprits is Russia – Europe’s largest supplier of natural gas.

EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson tweeted a map of the findings, saying it “shows what we want to fix with #MethaneStrategy”.

#Methane hotspots can be seen from space! At least by satellites like Sentinel-5P. This map shows what we want to fix with #MethaneStrategy! Technology to facilitate the strategy already exists thanks to #EUlong-term investments in satellite programs. #Copernicus #Horizon2020 pic.twitter.com/EmnDzJ1t1n

— Kadri Simson (@KadriSimson) October 13, 2020

Slashing methane emissions is critical to the EU’s climate ambition and its goal to reach net zero by 2050. The EU has a target to reduce greenhouse gases 40% from 1990 levels by 2030, with internal negotiations ongoing to deepen those cuts. In line with this, methane emissions will need to be reduced by around 35% compared to 2005, according to the Commission’s 2030 climate plan. 

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A failure to do so would undermine the EU’s Paris Agreement commitments, Katalin Cseh, Hungarian MEP for Renew Europe, told Climate Home.

Cseh described the EU methane strategy as “a promising step in the right direction” but said it was disappointing that binding targets and standards only remained under consideration. She added that a lack of data and uniform monitoring had hindered opportunities to reduce methane emissions to date.

Jutta Paulus, a German MEP for the European Green Party, said in a statement the strategy did not go far enough: “The European Commission only scratches the surface and limits itself to minor issues like plugging methane leaks and statistics. Counting emissions does not help when the order of the day is to reduce them.”

The EU produces 5% of global methane emissions internally but as the world’s largest importer of gas it plays a major role in influencing the climate policies of other countries, the strategy notes.

The EU imports around 47% of internationally traded gas, Poppy Kalesi, director of global energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, told Climate Home. Companies including Shell and BP have set voluntary targets to curb methane emissions, but legislative action is needed to achieve global reductions, according to Kalesi. 

“Setting a mandatory methane performance standard can catalyse constructive collaboration between the EU and supplier countries by making it easy on large European gas buyers to apply pressure on their suppliers to credibly engage with their methane emissions,” Kalesi said.

The post EU considers crackdown on methane leaks from imported oil and gas appeared first on Climate Home News.

New Zealand has an unusual mix of greenhouse gas emissions (unusual for a developed country, that is), as it has large numbers of sheep and cattle, which produce methane from digesting grass. These provide an opportunity for making rapid progress on the country becoming climate neutral.

A draft climate law published last week after extensive consultation, which singles out methane for a separate target, should be welcomed. Instead some have inaccurately interpreted it as a free pass to farmers.

If this truly were a concession to farmers, then nitrous oxide (released from manure and with a longer-lasting and more potent climate impact than methane) would not be required to reach net zero emissions. However, it is.

The government’s proposed methane emissions target is a cut of 24-47% by 2050, compared to “net-zero” for other greenhouse gases. It would be a compromise if methane affected the climate in the same way as carbon dioxide. However, it doesn’t.

The New Zealand government knows this, as do their scientific advisers, which is why they have come to a scientifically informed target, which is more akin to “net zero warming”.

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If you judge the targets on contributions to warming from each of the greenhouse gases, you come to the conclusion that farmers are being asked to do more to reverse global warming than CO2-emitting industries (everyone else).

New Zealand has prioritised science over institutional inertia in recognising the need to differentiate short-lived climate pollutants such as methane from cumulative pollutants such as CO2 in climate policy.

What does the government’s proposed methane reduction target mean for temperatures, alongside the other net zero targets?

Let’s imagine we start from today’s emissions and we draw a straight line to the 2050 targets, reducing emissions steadily over the whole 31 years. What would this mean for New Zealand’s contribution to global warming?

For CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases, every single year until 2050 they will be contributing more to global warming. As the emissions stay in the atmosphere, the amount in the atmosphere builds up and the warming increases year on year.

If New Zealand’s CO2 emissions remain zero from 2050 onwards, the warming from NZ-sourced atmospheric CO2 will remain almost constant over the following decades and even centuries. You have to actively remove the CO2 from the atmosphere to reduce its impact on temperature. Even if the whole world goes to net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere will still take many thousands of years to return to preindustrial levels.

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Methane is very different, as its lifetime is around a decade. That means that net zero global anthropogenic emissions of methane would lead to atmospheric methane concentrations reverting to natural levels within a few decades. Reducing methane emissions is therefore a rapidly effective way of reversing global warming, as any decline in methane emissions that is faster than about 0.3% per year will actually cause a reduction in global mean temperature.

This is a fundamentally important point and the cooling from reducing methane emissions should be correctly valued in mitigation plans, which would then allow them to be incentivised based on their climate impacts.

Suppose New Zealand’s farmers hit the lower end of the target range, cutting methane 24% by 2050. That decline in methane emissions would actually generate enough cooling to compensate for the warming generated by all the non-methane greenhouse gases emitted by New Zealand as they approach net zero.

In other words, the 24% reduction in methane would offset the warming impact of all the other emissions. New Zealand could declare itself climate neutral almost immediately, well before 2050, and only because farmers were reducing their methane emissions. That’s a free pass to all the other sectors, courtesy of New Zealand’s farmers.

Dr Michelle Cain is a science and policy researcher and Oxford Martin Fellow at the Environmental Change Institute and Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

The post New Zealand’s farmers have a chance to be climate leaders appeared first on Climate Home News.

A number of experiments in Asia, particularly in the Philippines and Japan, show that a change in the way rice is grown would have considerable other benefits in saving water and improving yield.

However, in Asia, which accounts for 90% of rice production, only a quarter of the crop is currently produced by direct seeding.

The research, cited by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, says that while rice is a staple food for more than half the world’s population, growing it is becoming less profitable because of the costs of labour, shortage of water and high energy costs.

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The research paper says that the present practice of tillage and planting in flooded rice paddies – known as puddling − damages the soil and affects the quality of future crops. This, plus the need to cut methane emissions, “demands a major shift from puddled transplanting to direct seeding of rice”.

Without changes, the world has no hope of reaching the extra 100 million tons of rice yield that it is estimated will be needed by 2035 – an increase of 25% on current crops.

Methane is the second major greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide, and agriculture accounts for 40% of these emissions. Although farm animals are a major source, flooded rice paddies emit as much as 500 million tons, which is around 20% of total manmade emissions of this gas.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that rice cultivation is a major contribution to global warming.

When rice is grown under puddled transplanted conditions, paddy soil becomes anoxic − depleted of dissolved oxygen − and then, in the absence of oxygen, microbes that break down plant matter produce methane.

Report: Cows, rice and soil are key to farming emissions cuts

Flooded soil may trap large quantities of methane, and this then escapes into the atmosphere during wet tillage, harrowing, transplanting and weeding.

Rice plants themselves also have a system of releasing methane through their leaves called methanogenesis. The rest escapes either by bubbling upwards or when the soil finally dries out.

Although not all rice is grown in flooded conditions, 90% of rice land globally is at least temporarily flooded. On average, the soil is fully waterlogged for about four months each year.

The research shows that direct seeded rice has a shorter flooding period (roughly a month) that ensures there is oxygen in the soil through most of the rice season. There is also decreased soil disturbance compared to transplanted rice seedlings.

Decreased methane

Thus, direct seeding is an effective technique to decrease the methane gas emissions otherwise released from the conventional puddled transplanted rice fields.

Jagdish K Ladha, principal scientist for soils and agronomy research at the International Rice Research Institute in New Delhi, says direct seeding of rice always reduces methane emissions from the crop and can be up to 90%, but that depends on methods used and the water management system.

A field experiment in the Philippines showed that the direct seeding techniques reduced methane emissions by 18% as compared with transplanted rice. Another study, in Japan, showed that global warming potential declined by 42% just by changing puddling of rice seedlings to zero tillage.

“Considering the effectiveness of direct seeding of rice to reduce the methane emissions, compared to the conventional rice transplanting technique, it is imperative that it be promoted throughout Asia,” Ladha says.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network. Santosh Koirala is a student of agriculture at the Agricultural and Forestry University in Rampur, Nepal

The post Simple planting switch could slash rice methane emissions appeared first on Climate Home News.

A still from infra-red footage shot by an Earthworks ITC-certified thermographer over the leak (Pic: EDF/You Tube)

By Joanna Peasland

A new study confirms the unprecedented Californian gas leak as the biggest ever, leading to a 20% spike in the state’s methane emissions.

An estimated 60 metric tonnes of gas spewed from the well near San Fernando Valley every hour, mounting to over 100,000 tonnes of methane and ethane during the 112-day blowout, according to a scientific study in the journal Science.

The figures exceed previous estimations and will leave an impact on the climate for the next 100 years, equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from 572,000 US cars, said the report.

At its worst, the ruptured well – finally plugged earlier this month – was California’s largest point source of methane.

The amount of gas being released was double that of a coal mine in Alabama and equal to one-quarter of the annual methane pollution from all other sources in the Los Angeles Basin combined, the report added.

Gas company SoCal detected the ruptured well on 23 October 2015, which continued to spew gas until it was plugged on 11 February.

The concentration of gases in the air was so high that experts could barely believe their readings. “This was just a huge event”, said lead scientist Stephen Conley.

Statewide methane emissions during the event increased by around 20%, according to the California Air Resources Board, undermining efforts to reduce greenhouse gas levels.

It was hoped that California’s ambitious targets to cut emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 would help progress towards a federal goal to cut emissions 26-28% on 2005 levels by 2025.

“Our results show how failures of natural gas infrastructure can significantly impact greenhouse gas control efforts,” said NOAA’s Tom Ryerson, a lead scientist on the study.

“Emitting just a little bit of methane greatly accelerates the rate of climactic change,” added EDF Chief Scientist Steven Hamburg.

-Methane is 84 times more polluting than carbon dioxide in the initial decades after it is released.
-Over a 100-year period, the effect of methane on warming the planet is 25 times that of Co2.

The report noted that rapid evaluation of episodes like the Aliso leak is essential to meet the requirements of the Paris climate agreement, which requires countries to be fully transparent in accounting for their emissions.

It also confirms the adverse human health impacts of major gas leaks. Scientists discovered above average levels of potentially dangerous compounds were found in the densely populated Porter Ranch in the San Fernando Valley, causing mass evacuations.

Sulphur-containing compounds such as mercaptan found in samples of the leaked gas can cause short-term loss of smell, nausea, headaches and other irritations.

SoCal are currently determining the cause of the leak and authorities aim to develop a climate mitigation program in response to the leak by March 31 this year.

University of California, Irvine (UCI) and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were among the institutions involved in the study.

The post Largest gas leak in US history leaves 100-year climate legacy appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Arctic Tundra is found across Alaska, Canada and Siberia, enjoying long fierce winters and shorter cool summers (Pic: Pixabay)

By Alex Kirby

The quantity of methane leaking from the frozen soil during the long Arctic winters is probably much greater than climate models estimate, scientists have found.

They say at least half of annual methane emissions occur in the cold months from September to May, and that drier, upland tundra can emit more methane than wetlands.

The multinational team, led by San Diego State University (SDSU) in the US and including colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Sheffield and the Open University in the UK, have published their conclusion, which challenges critical assumptions in current global climate models, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is about 25 times more powerful per molecule than carbon dioxide over a century, but more than 84 times over 20 years. The methane in the Arctic tundra comes primarily from organic matter trapped in soil which thaws seasonally and is decomposed by microbes.

It seeps naturally from the soil over the course of the year, but climate change can warm the soil enough to release more methane from organic matter that is currently stable in the permafrost. 

Carbon is frozen deep into the Arctic permafrost – stored in roots and other organic matter that can’t decay due to the cold (Pic: Pixabay)

Scientists have for some years been accurately measuring Arctic methane emissions and incorporating the results into their climate models. But crucially, the SDSU team says, almost all of these measurements have been obtained during the Arctic’s short summer.

Its long cold period has been largely “overlooked and ignored,” according to Walter Oechel of SDSU, with most researchers thinking that, because the ground is frozen solid during the cold months, methane emissions practically shut down for the winter.

“Virtually all the climate models assume there’s no or very little emission of methane when the ground is frozen,” he says. “That assumption is incorrect.”

The authors say the water trapped in the soil doesn’t freeze completely at 0°C. The top layer of the ground – known as the active layer – thaws in the summer and refreezes in the winter, and it experiences a kind of sandwiching effect as it freezes.

When temperatures are around 0°C (called “the zero curtain”) the top and bottom of the active layer begin to freeze, but the middle remains insulated. Micro-organisms in this unfrozen layer continue to break down organic matter and emit methane many months into the Arctic winter.

Dual approach

To find out how much methane is emitted during the winter, the researchers used both ground-based and airborne methods.

The ground-based researchers recorded methane emissions from five sampling towers in Alaska over two summer-autumn-winter cycles between June 2013 and January 2015 and found that a major part of winter emissions was recorded when temperatures hovered near the zero curtain.

“This is extremely relevant for the Arctic ecosystem, as the zero curtain period continues from September until the end of December, lasting as long as or longer than the entire summer season,” said Donatella Zona, the study’s lead author.

“These results are the opposite of what modellers have been assuming, which is that the majority of the methane emissions occur during the warm summer months while the cold-season methane contribution is nearly zero.”

Data confirmed

The researchers also found that during the cold season methane emissions were higher at the drier, upland tundra sites than in the wetlands. Upland tundra had previously been assumed to contribute a negligible amount of methane, Zona said.

To test whether the site-specific sampling was typical of methane emissions across the Arctic, the researchers compared their results with measurements recorded during flights made by NASA’s Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE). 

The data from the ground-based sites proved well-matched with the larger-scale aircraft measurements, which showed that large areas of Arctic tundra and boreal forest continued to emit high levels of methane to the atmosphere long after the surface soil had frozen.

The team also used satellite microwave sensor measurements to develop regional maps of surface water cover, including the timing, extent and duration of seasonal flooding and drying of the region’s wetlands. This showed that the big methane-emitting areas were in the drier tundra.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Karachaganak Processing Complex, KPO, Kazakhstan (Pic: BG Group/Flickr)

By Ed King

Statoil, BG Group and Pemex are among seven oil and gas majors to have proposed methane emission cuts listed as official contributions to a global climate deal.

The pledges were this week added to a UN database launched at the end of 2014, collating initiatives taken by business, regions and investors.

ENI, PTT, Southwestern Energy and Total have also committed to methane cuts – all part of an oil and gas initiative led by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

To comply with their pledges the companies will check operations for major leaks, invest in technology to prevent them and report progress back to the UN.

Methane emissions are far lower than carbon dioxide, but they are 84 times more potent as greenhouse gases over a 20-year period.

So far 3709 commitments are listed on the UN’s NAZCA website, 55 relating to energy, 165 to transport and 73 to utilities.

Green with gas: Oil majors eye UN climate deal

Earlier this year the chief executives of six leading hydrocarbon majors – including BG Group, Shell and BP – said they would announce further contributions to a UN climate deal by the end of 2015.

These are expected to be delivered next month, although green groups say high risk drilling ventures in the Arctic and Canada’s tar sands prove oil companies are not serious about a low carbon future.

Separately the World Bank wants all major oil and gas producers to sign up to a plan to stop gas flaring by 2030.

According to the Bank, around 140 billion cubic meters of natural gas is burnt annually, leading to the emission of 300 million tons of CO2.

Anita George, World Bank senior director for energy, told the FT she wanted the commitment to be a “de facto global industry standard”.

Russia, Kazakhstan, Angola and Norway have signed up, along with Shell, Statoil and Total, but Saudi Arabia, Canada and the US have not.

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Carbon credits could fund landfill sites to capture methane for power (Pic: Flickr/James)

By Alex Pashley in Barcelona

To gee up green projects at risk of closure, the World Bank has guaranteed a minimum price for methane credits being auctioned for the first time.

That will stimulate investment in projects ranging from biomass to waste management in developing countries, it hopes, curbing emissions of the heat-trapping gas.

The owner of a landfill site could capture methane from the waste to generate power, for example.

The World Bank says its plans will give financial security to sites in developing countries and could reduce 850 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent up to 2020. That is the same as taking half a billion cars off the road.

“There are about 1,200 projects that have been started or ready to start with significant greenhouse gas reduction potential in 2020 that today are lacking the financial incentive and need to operate because they were counting on sales of carbon credits,” Brice Quesnel, carbon finance specialist said in Barcelona at a conference.

“As we know, the market is not providing the price that is needed.”

Analysis: Can carbon pricing be a climate saviour?

Carbon prices under the global Clean Development Mechanism are languishing at less than €1 a tonne. The Pilot Auction Facility will auction carbon credits on 15 July, guaranteeing a higher price.

Methane reductions alone could lead to around 0.3C in avoided global warming by 2050, according to the bank.

Over the next 20 years, methane emissions are expected to grow by 19%, accounting for nearly half of all warming over this period.

Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and is a by-product from agricultural and industrial processes.

The facility backed by Switzerland, Germany and Sweden is halfway to its $100 million funding target.

Quesnel told RTCC a second auction was likely to take place in “at least” six months time.

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Pic: www_ukberri_net/Flickr

By Sophie Yeo

The White House laid out its long-awaited strategy to reduce emissions of methane from the oil and gas industry on Wednesday.

Methane, a greenhouse gas that has 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide, must be reduced to 40-45% below 2012 levels by 2025, the government announced.

The Environmental Protection Agency will issue proposed rules for new and modified oil and gas production in the summer of 2015, with a final decision due in 2016.

Janet McCabe, from the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, promised the regulations would not unduly burden the industry.

“We believe the steps we’ve outlined here will protect the public health and the environment of the environment of this country, ensure safe and responsible oil and gas operations and allow the industry to continue to grow and provide a vital source of energy for Americans across the country,” she said.

The rules, to be administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, will save enough gas in 2025 to heat more than two million homes, administration officials said.

The US is the largest oil and gas producer in the world and methane leaks from the industry pose a global warming problem.

Emissions have gone down 16% since 1990, but are projected to rise by 25% by 2025 without additional steps.

The White House said it was too early to provide sharp estimates on the cost of the measures. President Barack Obama’s 2016 budget will propose US$15 million in funding for the Department of Energy to develop more cost-effective technologies to detect and reduce methane leaks in natural gas production.

The White House will also continue to welcome voluntary efforts by the sector.

“Oil and gas companies can also choose to become power players in reducing harmful, wasteful methane emissions from existing sources,” wrote John Podesta, an advisor to Obama, in a blog.

The announcement was criticised by green groups because it does not cover methane emissions from pipelines that transport the fuels.

“We cannot afford to wait: regulating methane directly is a critical step, but EPA and BLM [Bureau of Land Management] must act quickly to reduce methane emissions from all new and existing sources of methane pollution in the oil and gas sector, including the transmission and distribution of natural gas,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Linda Capato, fracking campaign director at 350.org, added: “While the proposed regulations acknowledge the major climate threat posed by fracking, they give a free pass to many existing sources of methane pollution, like leaky transmission and distribution infrastructure.”

Curbs on methane emissions were promised in March 2014 as part of Obama’s Climate Action Plan. Dan Utech, special assistant to President Obama on energy and climate change, said the administration had made “substantial progress” on this.

This has included new standards for coal-fired power plants, targeting one of the major sources of pollution in the US.

The next big environmental challenge of Obama’s second term will come in the shape of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

The president must decide whether to issue a final veto of the controversial project or allow construction to go ahead, bringing oil from Canadian tar sands to refineries on the US Gulf Coast.

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By Sophie Yeo

The White House is set to unveil a new package of measures that will crack down on methane emissions from the oil and gas industry.

A new attack on the powerful greenhouse gas was promised in March 2014, but has been subject to delays. A spokesperson for the US Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for the regulations, told RTCC they are due any day now.

Methane is more than 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide when it comes to warming the atmosphere and makes up 9% of US greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike emissions from vehicles and coal power plants it is not yet regulated by the US government.

The oil and gas industry is responsible for around 29% of US methane emissions, which leak from inefficient equipment.

Any new methane regulations from the EPA will have to be completed by the end of 2016, according to the White House’s methane strategy, which was released in March last year setting out a work plan on how the administration would approach the problem.

“The only open question is how broad will they be in mandating deep methane cuts across oil and gas operations on private and public land,” Jake Schmidt, director of the International Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told RTCC.

Not a burden

The Agency already has a number of voluntary programmes aimed at reducing methane emissions.

While some industry players are reluctant to bend to new regulations, it makes economic sense to address the leakages, says Mark Brownstein, chief counsel at the Environmental Defense Fund.

“The bottom line is this: when the administration takes action to reduce methane emissions, they’re also taking action to reduce waste in the oil and gas industry.

“That is compelling even to those Americans for whom the environment isn’t their first priority and I think the industry is on the losing side of common sense here.”

A report by ICF International, commissioned by the EDF, found that cutting methane emissions by 40% below projected 2018 levels would cost less than U$0.01 for each 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

That means they should attract less hostility from industry than proposed curbs on coal-fired power plants, said Brownstein

These new methane regulations will be announced ahead of Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, which the president will make on the 20 January.

According to presidential advisor John Podesta, his speech will include a section on fighting global warming.

Obama’s focus on climate change has intensified during his second term. His recent threat to veto any new bill to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline was hailed as a victory for activists opposed to its construction.

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The red blob shows raised levels of methane in the air, as measured from space between 2003-2009
(Source: NASA)

By Megan Darby

Unconventional methods of extracting fossil fuels could be releasing more methane into the atmosphere than thought, scientists have warned.

The US administration is taking steps to make the coal, oil and gas sectors measure and reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

NASA has published satellite data that shows emissions at a methane “hot spot” are more than triple what was measured on the ground.

Scientists first noticed the blip near the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah years ago.

“We didn’t focus on it because we weren’t sure if it was a true signal or an instrument error,” said researcher Christian Frankenberg.

But the high readings persisted. Between 2003 and 2009, the region released an average 0.59 million tonnes of methane a year, almost 3.5 times the ground-based estimate.

Fracking

This was before the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, which is known to pose a risk of methane leakage, became common in the area.

Scientists from the University of Michigan traced the rogue emissions in this case to coalbed methane production in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico.

That is a technique to extract gas from the cracks in coal seams. In 2012, methane from this source supplied 8% of US natural gas demand.

“The results are indicative that emissions from established fossil fuel harvesting techniques are greater than inventoried,” said lead author Eric Kort.

“There’s been so much attention on high-volume hydraulic fracturing, but we need to consider the industry as a whole.”

Warming potential

Methane has a global warming effect 21 times stronger than carbon dioxide. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it accounted for 9% of US greenhouse gas emissions in 2012.

US president Barack Obama’s climate action plan includes a strategy to reduce these emissions.

The EPA estimates nearly half (49%) of US methane emissions come from fossil fuel sectors. Livestock and decomposing waste also produce methane.

The latest study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests traditional methods of accounting for methane may underestimate the scale of the problem.

Kort and his team took the satellite measurements of methane concentrations in the air and used a model to calculate the emissions rate needed to produce those results.

Frankenberg said the study showed the value of measurements from space.

“Satellite data cannot be as accurate as ground-based estimates, but from space, there are no hiding places,” he said.

The findings came as a UK coalbed methane project got the go-ahead.

Dart Energy’s application to explore a coal seam in North Wales was originally turned down by the local authority, but this decision was overturned on appeal.

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US secretary of state John Kerry
(Pic: flickr/state department)

By Ed King in New York

US secretary of state John Kerry says governments must take the threats posed from climate change more seriously, labelling the lack of current action “disturbing”.

In an impassioned address to business leaders on the opening day of New York climate week, Kerry repeated his view that global warming is as serious a security concern as terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.

And he urged leaders attending a climate summit at UN headquarters tomorrow to “move and act now”, warning that nature was now “screaming” at the world.

“It’s about time leaders come to the UN,” he said. “I hope this summit will give leadership. We have a small window of time.”

Methane pledge

In the first of what is expected to be a series of small announcements from Washington this week, Kerry said the US was giving US$15 million to the World Bank to help kickstart a new market-based scheme to curb methane emissions.

Methane is a potent climate warming gas, often released during mining and drilling for hydrocarbons. Vast quantities are also stored in the northern hemisphere permafrost and are released as the earth warms.

Kerry said he had instructed all 275 US foreign missions to make climate change their priority, putting it on the “front burner”.

MEF

He also confirmed the US intends to use the Major Economies Forum, which includes the world’s top 17 emitters, covering 80% of global carbon pollution, to pressure countries to cut their carbon footprints.

Foreign ministers linked to the MEF met in New York last night, a gathering Kerry said was significant because it was a sign that climate change is moving out of its environmental silo.

He said the group would meet again early next year, to ensure all members were fulfilling their emissions goals ahead of a proposed global agreement in the French capital in December.

“Well before Paris we need to make sure the major economies are putting forward their emission goals,” he said.

China

Kerry added that recent meetings with China had left him encouraged leaders in Beijing understood the risks and opportunities posed by climate change.

“If together we can state ambitious goals for next year, our hope is that can act as a major incentive for other countries,” he said.

The face of US foreign policy also said the economic case for change was powerful, pointing to a $6 trillion energy market and the need for $90 trillion of investment in cities over the coming decades.

Kerry confirmed the US was on course to deliver its plans for a 2015 UN deal by March next year – the US has committed to curb emissions 17% on 2005 levels by 2020.

But he said continuing deadlock in the US Congress was hampering the country’s efforts to develop a united plan to decarbonise. And he noted the lack of a national grid across the US limits the deployment of renewable energy projects.

In stinging attack on Republican opponents and leading fossil fuel companies ahead of the upcoming US mid term elections, he said continued efforts to undermine climate policies, particularly from coal companies, were unacceptable.

“We need to think hard about campaign contributions to outcomes… that is critical.”

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(Pic: NASA)

By Sophie Yeo

Two US senators have introduced a bipartisan bill to reduce the short-lived but powerful greenhouse gases responsible for around 40% of global warming.

The Super Pollutants Act of 2014 was introduced on Thursday by Democrat Senator Chris Murphy and Republican Senator Susan Collins.

The support of both parties for the Bill is significant, as President Obama has previously struggled to find enough Republican support to allow him to pass new climate legislation.

This week he lambasted climate sceptic Republicans in Congress for catering to a “bunch of fringe elements”.

In May, an uncontroversial bipartisan bill on energy efficiency failed when it became entangled with more divisive issues including the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Powerful gases

The short-lived pollutants regulated by the Bill include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are used in fridges, together with methane and soot.

Unlike carbon dioxide, which causes around 60% of global warming, these gases only remain in the atmosphere for between a couple of days to a decade and a half, but they warm the planet much more quickly.

For instance, over a period of 20 years, a ton of methane has the same warming impact as 72 tons of CO2.

A study released in May suggested the early phase-out of super climate gases could stop release of 146 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent by 2050, lowering warming by up to 0.6C.

Last month China announced plans to cut emissions from production of HFCs by 280 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – similar to the annual carbon footprint of Spain.

US action

The new Bill proposes a new taskforce to oversee the reduction of these super pollutants.

“As we work to combat threats to our climate, we can’t leave short-lived pollutants out of the equation,” said Senator Chris Murphy.

“Our bill will take these dangerous pollutants head on by making smarter use of tools already at our disposal here in the US.

“This is a bipartisan proposal to address a global threat, and I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to help us reduce these super pollutants.”

Senator Collins added: “With improved inter-agency cooperation and through commonsense efforts to reduce the emissions of these super pollutants, this proposal aims to meaningfully and quickly help slow climate warming.”

Durwood Zaelke, President of the Washington-based Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development welcomed the news.

“The Super Pollutants Act will accelerate and coordinate Administration efforts already underway to reduce short lived climate pollutants (SLCPs)”, he said.

“This will reinforce the President’s international leadership on this critical climate strategy. It’s essential to reduce SLCPs along with carbon dioxide to keep the climate within safe bounds.”

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Source: Flickr/Juergen Adolph

By Gerard Wynn

Thawing permafrost in the northern hemisphere will lead to relatively more methane than carbon dioxide emissions, which could lead to more serious climate impacts than previously thought, a study said.

Thawing peatland emits CO2 and methane, as new plants grow and microbes digest the newly available organic matter.

Whether they emit proportionally more methane or CO2 is important, because methane is more than 30 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas on a 100-year timescale.

Thawing permafrost could lead to significant greenhouse gas emissions, creating an unstoppable momentum, where emissions led to more warming in turn accelerating the thaw, in a series of positive feedbacks also called a tipping point.

Northern peatlands are already a net source of methane emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas, equivalent to 6–12% of annual fossil fuel emissions of CO2, estimated the new study published in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors tested the process of methane emissions from thawing permafrost at a site in northern Sweden.

They calculated that, as permafrost thawed, a gradual subsidence and flooding led to relatively more emissions of methane than CO2, as a result of a shift in chemical reactions as the peat thawed and flooded, and as different plant communities flourished.

“This impact of permafrost thaw on organic matter chemistry could intensify the predicted climate feedbacks,” said the authors from various US and European universities and research centres, describing previous estimates as “conservative” in the light of the new findings.

Tipping point

A continuing permafrost thaw, and especially rising methane emissions, can have potentially significant climate impacts.

Peatlands in the permafrost zone of the northern hemisphere contain an estimated 277 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to 1,017 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), the paper reported.

That compares with annual manmade carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels of 34.5 billion tonnes of CO2.

And it is roughly equal to the 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 that humankind can emit over the course of this century and still limit global average warming to no more than 2C, which is deemed a level that will avoid the most dangerous floods, droughts and short-term sea level rise.

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Source: Flickr/Daniel Foster

By Ed King

The White House has launched a new methane reduction strategy it says will help cut US greenhouse gas emissions 1% by the end of the decade.

The plans target landfills, coal mines, agriculture and the oil and gas industry, which are all high emitters of methane, one of the world’s most potent climate warming gases.

Methane accounts for about 9% of US emissions, with 30% coming from fossil fuel extraction and 23% from cows and othert farm animals.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, over a 100-year period its impact is 20 times greater ‘pound for pound’ than carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.

“The strategy summarizes the sources of methane emissions, commits to new steps to cut emissions of this potent greenhouse gas, and outlines the Administration’s efforts to improve the measurement of these emissions,” Dan Utech, Special Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, says in a blog.

The plans could deliver greenhouse gas emissions reductions up to 90 million metric tons in 2020, says the report.

To put that in context, in 2012 total US emissions were 6,501.5 million metric tonnes.

The EPA already has a series of voluntary programmes aimed at encouraging industries and individuals to reduce their methane emissions.

The new plan says regulations for ‘waste mine methane’ are to be discussed in April, a biogas ‘roadmap’ will be launched in June, and new standards for landfills will be announced later in the summer.

The EPA will assess methane leakages from the oil and gas sectors in the spring, with a view to “completing” any regulations by 2016.

The proposals form part of President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan, released last June, which aims to ensure the US meets its international obligations of cutting emissions 17% on 2005 levels by 2020.

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Agriculture can help itself by investing in renewable energy and cutting its carbon emissions. (Source: SAS)

By Nilima Choudhury

Climate scientists have predicted maize and wheat yields could fall by 19-30% by 2065, a disparity which has now been solved by researchers at Princeton University.

It’s a hugely important issue, as maize and wheat are staple foods for up two-thirds of people around the world.

The report in the journal Global Change Biology is one of the first to compare the agricultural projections generated by two different models – empirical, from field observations, and mechanistic, from laboratory tests.

Under the hotter, wetter conditions projected by the climate scenarios they used, the empirical model estimated that maize production could drop by 3.6 %, while wheat output could increase by 6.2%. Meanwhile, the mechanistic model calculated that maize and wheat yields might go up by 6.5 and 15.2%, respectively.

It offers more evidence that empirical models show greater losses as a result of climate change, while mechanistic models may be overly optimistic.

“A yield projection based only on empirical models is likely to show larger yield losses than one made only with mechanistic models. Neither should be considered more right or wrong, but people should be aware of these differences,” associate research scholar Lyndon Estes said..

“People who are interested in climate-change science should be aware of all the sources of uncertainty inherent in projections, and should be aware that scenarios based on a single model — or single class of models — are not accounting for one of the major sources of uncertainty.”

Despite the disparities, climate scientists, governments and charitable organisations agree that climate change will adversely impact agricultural output.

Although agriculture is acknowledged to provide the primary source of livelihood for many people, it is also reported to cause up to one third of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to researchers.

Farming emissions

A significant portion of these emissions come from methane, which, in terms of its contribution to global warming, is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

According to the US Food and Agriculture Organization agricultural methane output could increase by 60% by 2030. The world’s 1.5 billion cows and billions of other grazing animals emit dozens of polluting gases, including lots of methane.

Speaking to RTCC Dr. Jonathan Scurlock, chief adviser to the National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales, said it was important to be aware of the whole picture.

“There is a tendency to blame the whole of food production for being a significant source of GHG emissions because if you actually drill down into the details, agriculture is responsible for 8.5% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

But he made it clear that the sector was not averse to the idea of making changes in order to mitigate climate change.

“The agriculture industry as a whole does take responsibility for its greenhouse gas emissions – we have negotiated with government ambitions for reducing our contribution to the national greenhouse gas budget,” said Dr Scurlock.

He said the simplest solution would be to switch from burning fossil fuels to low carbon energy, but before that, changes to farming practices need to be made.

“If we want to eat we want to be able to grow crops. What we can try and do is be more efficient in the way we manage agriculture and more efficient perhaps through clever genetics, gradually making crops more nitrogen efficient to reduce that down to a minimum figure – same thing with methane from ruminants to animals.”

The post Will climate change hit maize and wheat production? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Soot from wood burning may not be as dangerous as previously thought. (Source: Lnk Si)

New research suggests soot and methane have less of an impact on global temperatures than previously thought.

A study by the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the University of Maryland found that cutting soot and methane produced an average temperature reduction of 0.16°C by 2050, which is substantially less than the 0.5°C reduction found in earlier studies.

When looking at individual scenarios that employed various assumptions about aerosols, temperature reductions varied from a low of just 0.04°C to a high of 0.35°C.

Soot, also called black carbon, is emitted from power stations, motor vehicles and wood burning. Methane is released from leaking pipelines, coal mines, oil wells, cattle, rice paddies and landfills.

Both are described as short-term ‘climate forcers’ because scientists believe they trap more heat than other greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Both gases remain in the atmosphere for a relatively short time: a couple weeks for soot and up to a decade for methane. Carbon dioxide can stick around for 1,000 or more years.

“Cutting back only on soot and methane emissions will help the climate, but not as much as previously thought,” said the study’s lead author, climate researcher Steve Smith of PNNL.

“If we want to stabilise the climate system, we need to focus on greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. Concentrating on soot and methane alone is not likely to offer much of a shortcut.”

Political efforts

At least two studies have been published since 2010 that suggest reducing soot and methane would cut human-caused global temperature increases by half of a degree Celsius, or about 1 degree Fahrenheit, by 2050.

International leaders took note and formed the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants in 2012.

For further comparison, Smith also evaluated these results against what would happen if global efforts to address climate change increased.

While focusing on reducing all greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, a ‘comprehensive climate policy scenario’ also reduced the amount of soot in the atmosphere.

As a result, the climate policy scenario lowered global average temperatures by 0.27°C in 2050, which is more than when only short-lived climate forcers were controlled.

“Focusing on soot and methane may be worth targeting for health reasons, as previous studies have identified substantial health benefits from reducing those emissions,” Smith said.

“To stabilise the global climate, however, the focus needs to be on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”

The post Soot and methane cuts will not control climate change – report appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: UNMIT/M.Perret)

By Tim Radford

Here’s another shuddering twist to the horror story that is climate change: even earthquakes may play a role.

Large quantities of methane may have escaped during a violent earthquake that shook the floor of the Arabian Sea in 1945, according to German and Swiss researchers.

David Fischer of the University of Bremen and colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven and the ETH in Zurich explored the region in a research ship in 2007, and began to examine cores of sediment from the seabed.

One core, from just 1.6 metres below the seabed, contained methane hydrate – an ice-like mixture of methane and water –  and the other did not.

But, the researchers report in Nature Geoscience, both cores carried subtle chemical evidence that at some point in the past dramatic quantities of methane or natural gas had actually flowed through the sediments beneath the Arabian Sea.

Since the methane would move as a gas, there is only one direction it could go: bubbling upwards through the sea into the atmosphere. And since methane is a potent greenhouse gas – at least 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide – such escapes could be significant.

“We started going through the literature and found that a major earthquake had occurred close by in 1945”, said Dr Fischer. “Based on several indicators, we postulated that the earthquake led to the fracturing of the sediments, releasing the gas that had been trapped below the hydrates into the ocean.”

The tremor was recorded at magnitude 8.1 – magnitude 9 is about as bad as an earthquake can be – and seismic waves would have raced through the seabed at colossal speeds, quite enough to shake loose any brittle chemical structures in the seabed.

The researchers estimate that the release of methane from that location since that one event could be conservatively estimated at 7.4 million cubic metres: this is roughly the capacity of 10 large gas tankers.

Global carbon budgets

This calculation does not take into account how much escaped during the quake itself, and it holds for only one location. “There are probably even more sites in the area that had been affected by the earthquake”, said Dr Fischer.

Such research is another reminder of the complexity of the planet’s climate system. Methane hydrates can be considered as a form of fossil fuel: decayed plant material from millions of years ago, trapped in the mud under the pressing weight of the sea.

Climate scientists have for decades worried about the fragility of these hydrates – as the world warms, they are likely to be released in huge quantities from the Arctic seabed, for instance – but this is the first evidence that natural rather than human-triggered cataclysms could make a serious difference to the global carbon budget.

The lesson is that scientists now have to take such processes into account as they try to calculate the carbon budget for the planet – the quantities of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, the volumes subsequently absorbed by plants and then incorporated into sediments.

“We now provide a new mechanism of carbon export that had not been considered before”, said Dr Fischer, and with his co-authors he pushes the message home in the research paper.

“We therefore suggest that hydrocarbon seepage triggered by earthquakes needs to be considered in local and global carbon budgets at active continental margins.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Melting ice in the Arctic is one of the best indicators of rising land and ocean temperatures, and could have serious knock-on effects

By Sophie Yeo

An economic time bomb is buried within the melting Arctic sea ice, scientists have warned.

The effect of the methane that is released as the permafrost in the East Siberian Sea melts will cost $60 trillion – the size of the global economy in 2012.

Researchers from Cambridge and Rotterdam wrote in Nature that the release of the 50 gigatonnes of methane trapped within the ice will trigger both an environmental and economic disaster.

In both cases, it is economically developing countries that are likely to be left to pick up the tab. Roughly 80% of the cost will be borne by poorer countries, where extreme weather, flooding, droughts and health problems pose the greatest threat.

“In parts of Asia and Africa where it’s just marginally possible to farm at the moment, if we have this methane going into the atmosphere on top of all the other greenhouse gases, those parts may end up being unable to be productive agriculturally – that’s part of where this 60 trillion dollars’ worth of impact comes from,” says Chris Hope, Reader in Policy Modelling at the University of Cambridge.

He told RTCC, “It’s a very nasty prospect for some parts of the world, and what we hope is that if we put this figure out there it will stimulate people to think, ‘Gosh, maybe we ought to be trying hard in order to avoid those kinds of impacts occurring.’

“Maybe it’ll add a bit more impetus to governments deciding to put a price on our greenhouse gas emissions or other efforts that might be made to stop climate change impacts being as bad as they otherwise would be.”

Method

The study used the Page 09 model, used by the US EPA to measure the social costs of carbon, to calculate the various climate change possibilities of the Arctic ice methane emissions.

The model measures the economic impact of sea level rise, any factors that contribute towards the GDP such as losses of agriculture production, along with loss of ecosystems and the effects on human health.

“We ran the model 10,000 times with the ranges of values for all the different inputs to get a good picture of just how uncertain the effects were likely to be,” says Hope. “$60 trillion is the mean of those 10,000 runs.

“There’s a 5% change we could end up being really lucky and the climate sensitivity and the vulnerability of the economy are low and we don’t end up melting the ice sheets. Then there’s a 5% chance therefore the impacts will be below 10 trillion dollars.

“There’s also an equal chance we could be really unlucky and the climate sensitivity is a bit higher than we thought and sheets melt a bit quicker. Then there’s a 5% chance the impacts could be above 220 trillion dollars.”

East Siberian Sea

The study, focusing on just the East Siberian Sea, models the economic impact of only a small proportion of the vast reservoirs of methane – a greenhouse gas with 50 times the warming effect of CO2.

Researchers still believe that this volume of emissions alone could have a catastrophic impact on climate change, predicting it could bring forward the moment when global temperatures reach 2 degrees by between 15 and 35 years.

But this is just a small proportion of the huge reservoirs of greenhouse gases trapped within not only the sea ice, but also within permafrost that is retreating over land mass as well.

Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, says that the East Siberian Sea amounts to only about a quarter of the total area of the Arctic shelf.

He told RTCC, “Until more research is done we can’t say how much will be released from elsewhere, or how much is going to be released from land sources. The permafrost on land, which is a much bigger area than the offshore permafrost, is also melting more slowly, but it’s releasing methane as well.”

The team focused the East Siberian Sea because it is particularly shallow, which means that the methane is released directly into the atmosphere, rather than passing through the ocean, which means it has the opportunity to dissolve and be emitted as the less potent CO2.

It was also possible because of the large amount of data available on the area, due to regular summer expeditions by the University of Alaska and the Pacific Ocean Graphic Institute in Vladivostok.

Gathering the kind of data needed to replicate the study across the rest of the ice shelf could pose difficulties, as the other large areas of shallow continental shelf are mostly in the Russian economic zone of the Arctic.

Any research has to be collaborative between Russian and Western organisations, which can be difficult to set up due to Russia’s sensitivity about their reliance on the oil resources contained beneath the ice.

Influencing governments

Gail Whiteman, Professor of sustainability, management and climate change at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, says she hopes that governments and financial institutions will take Arctic change more seriously after considering their study.

She told RTCC, “Right now, for most Arctic countries, the governments are focused on relatively short term economic gains from access to natural resources and increased shipping.

However, this discussion needs to include the bigger picture.  By identifying that nearly 80% of the impacts from this one feedback will be felt by developing countries, we are hoping that the governments of these countries will become more active on Arctic issues.”

She says that while it is a good first step that the World Economic Forum has started to recognise the strategic importance of the Arctic, establishing the first Global Agenda Council on the Arctic last autumn, more still needs to be done.

She suggests that there needs to be a more comprehensive discussion within the council, and that the European Commission provides more help to projects that combine climate science with economics.

“Some people are swayed just by the moral case or the scientific case, but it seems as though the vast majority of people are swayed as much or more by issues like value for money and so on,” says Hope.

“I think it’s important to have a calculation of that, even though it’s always going to be an uncertain number, because that’s the way it gets into these kinds of forums like the World Economic Forum, into governments and into the decision making processes of big companies.”

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Japan has successfully captured natural gas from deep under the ocean by tapping into methane hydrates, using a new technology that could revolutionize the world’s energy supply.

It is the first country to succeed in exploiting the gas.

The gas supplies locked into methane hydrates are potentially the largest single source of fossil fuels on the planet and for Japan, a country desperate for its own energy supplies, this could be an economic lifeline. The post-Fukushima nuclear shutdown has intensified what was already a difficult situation.

On the other hand, many would regard almost unlimited supplies of a new fossil fuel as bad news in a world where there is already climate change caused by man’s existing excess carbon emissions.

Japan’s resources of ice-like methane hydrate could send it toward energy self sufficiency (Source: USGS)

The announcement of the successful extraction of methane from underneath the sea floor off the Japanese coast came from the country’s Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry (METI).

This is well within economic reach for a pipeline from potential industrial and domestic users in central Japan. The hydrate is basically frozen methane and water, which forms in large lumps under the right temperature and pressure conditions.

The quantity of energy locked away in these formations is enormous. If you melt a one cubic meter block of methane hydrate, about 160 cubic meters of gaseous methane will be released. Potentially, the deposits in the sea around Japan could make a resource-hungry country self-sufficient in energy.

The tests by the state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) are continuing. It hopes to exploit the technology commercially in a new phase of drilling between 2016 and 2018.

According to the US Oil & Gas Journal, the test well is in 1,000 metres of water off the Atsumi and Shima peninsulas. The hydrate is a further 270 metres below the sea bed in the Nankai trough.

Plenty more where this came from

So far the problem with exploiting the hydrates has been that they become unstable if the pressure or temperature changes. However, it is by reducing the pressure on the deposits in controlled conditions that Japanese technicians have been able to capture the released methane.

According to a Japanese study there are 1.1 trillion cubic metres of methane hydrate around its coasts, equivalent to more than a decade of current Japanese gas consumption. This quantity is dwarfed by the amount in other parts of the world, particularly the Arctic.

The US, Canada and China have all been trying to work out ways of exploiting the potential of hydrates but it is Japan that appears to have come up with a solution.

Environmental groups fear the global warming potential of hydrates. Scientists are already studying the effect of warming oceans and permafrost melting on the large deposits of hydrates on the sea-bed and in the tundra.

Some fear that large releases will worsen the effects of climate change, while others believe the vast majority of deposits will remain stable.

The prospect of drilling into them and possibly releasing methane – a potent greenhouse gas – in an attempt to exploit them for fuel will spark an international debate.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Environment Ministers from states bordering the Arctic have called for urgent action on short lived climate pollutants (SLCP) such as methane, HFCs and black carbon soot.

Ministers and senior officials from the USA, Russia, Canada, Norway and other Arctic countries pressed for efforts to reduce these potent global warming emissions in order to maintain the balance of the Arctic ecosystem, following a two-day summit in Sweden.

“Ministers stressed the need for urgent action to reduce SLCP emissions to contribute to Arctic climate change mitigation and to the preservation of the unique culture and ecosystems of the Arctic which are under threat from rapid climate changes,” read the statement issued at the conclusion of the meeting.

Black carbon, which includes soot and other carbon particles can antagonise warming in the Arctic by covering reflective ice and absorbing additional heat into the ice speeding up its melt.

The Arctic Environment Secretariat meeting in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden including Canada’s Peter Kent, back row centre. (Source: Swedish Ministry of Environment)

“Ministers acknowledged the worrying scientific findings identifying large-scale tipping points in the Arctic, such as collapse of the Arctic summer sea-ice, accelerating melting of the Greenland ice sheet, releases of methane from melting permafrost, all of which, if crossed, may have substantial global effects,” the Ministers said.

Arctic sea ice levels, which fluctuate with the seasons, shrank to a record low this summer while surface melting of the Greenland ice sheet was under way across 97% of its surface.

UNEP has predicted that 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions could come from methane released by thawing permafrost in the Arctic and Tundra regions by 2200.

“Reducing black carbon and the other short-lived climate pollutants can cut the rate of Arctic warming by two-thirds. We need a crash course that starts today with black carbon, which is responsible for half of the Arctic warming,” said Durwood Zaelke, founder and president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD).

HFCs can have a warming effect 1,000 times greater than that of CO2 but do not damage the ozone layer. They are commonly used as replacement for CFCs that the Montreal Protocol has all but eradicated. There are now calls for a similar approach to stave of the growth in the use of HFCs.

“We need to reduce HFCs under the Montreal Protocol, as this is the single biggest, fastest, and cheapest climate mitigation available to the world today, avoiding the equivalent of 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide,” added Zaelke.

The EU has recently published its own proposals to tackle HFCs that include a gradual decrease in use. It is hoped that this could help to clear the path for more aggressive action on HFCs internationally through the Montreal Protocol.

Environmentalists are sometimes reluctant to champion non-CO2 reductions, wary of the distraction from the necessary longer term effort required to take meaningful action on climate change.

Norway, Russia, Canada and the US, all part of the Arctic Environment Secretariat are also all major fossil fuel producers.

All four are also expressing an interest in exploring for oil and gas inside the Arctic. A spill response plan developed by the Arctic Council was dismissed by Greenpeace as “vague” earlier this week.

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Both sides of the shale gas debate have scored a point with the release of two new pieces of research.

New evidence presented jointly by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Boulder, estimates methane leaks from shale gas drill sites total around 9% of the total gas production.

Previous estimates of 4% caused controversy initially but the same team has now found higher leakage rates at other drill sites.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere 72 times greater than CO2 over a 20 year period.

When leaks pass 2% the emission reduction benefits of using shale gas rather than coal to generate electricity are cancelled out.

The shale gas boom in the US reduced its domestic emissions but has created local environmental tensions. (Source: Flickr/SkyTruth)

Hydraulic fracturing pumps a mix of sand, water and chemicals into shale rock formations to open fissures and release the trapped gas.

Claims that this technique can pollute water sources have led to many US states, including New York to ban the practice.

However, a leaked report from the New York Health Department appears to clear the practice.

The report, written in February of 2012, says “significant adverse impacts on human health are not expected from routine HVHF (hydro fracking) operations.” Shale gas advocates called for the ban to be immediately lifted.

However a statement from the state Department of Environmental Conservation said this was “outdated” and “does not reflect final DEC policy”.

The issue of methane leaks is also hotly contested with the most recent study at one end of the spectrum at 9% and another paper published in November last year putting its own estimates at less than 1%.

The US has reduced its emissions by using its shale gas reserves to produce electricity instead of coal. Critics question this claim as the coal has instead been exported to other markets.

The post New fracking research: Bad for climate, fine for your health appeared first on Climate Home News.

Promised Land is released in the States next week and focuses on a gas company salesman looking to buy drilling rights in a small farming community and a local school teacher who launches a campaign in opposition.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, pumps high pressure liquids into the fissures in rocks to release shale gas.

The rapid expansion of shale gas in the US has created jobs and improved the country’s energy security but opponents are concerned over the effect on local water supplies. There are also concerns around methane leaks at drill sites that would contribute to climate change.

While the film’s stars, including the Damon, an ardent environmentalist, have gone to great lengths to stress that the story is not an anti-fracking polemic, as the basis of its plot it is likely to stir debate.

The documentary Gasland has been heavily criticised for linking its most famous scene, of a man setting his methane contaminated tap water on fire, with fracking.

The methane was in fact seeping naturally into local water supplies, a fact verified by state officials who were aware of the problem prior to the documentary.

The industry responded with a rebuttal movie called Truthland, which features a man in New York state, where fracking is banned, lighting his tap water on fire too.

The post Matt Damon movie set to ignite fracking debate appeared first on Climate Home News.

Frozen soils could account for 39% of emissions as temperatures rise (Source: subarcticmike/Creative Commons)

Melting permafrost could account for 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and must be considered by governments meeting for the climate talks in Doha, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned.

Researchers have found that melting permafrost could emit 43 to 135 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by 2100 and up to 415 gigatonnes by 2200.

This would blow apart hopes of keeping global warming below 2C on pre-industrial levels.

Permafrost covers around a quarter of the northern hemisphere and contains around 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon; twice that currently in the atmosphere, yet its melt has not been included in climate-prediction modelling to date.

Permafrost is made up of an ‘active’ layer that melts each summer and permanently frozen soil underneath. As temperatures rise, scientists warn this active layer could increase, causing the organic matter stored in the frozen soil to thaw and decay and more carbon dioxide and methane to be emitted into the atmosphere.

The report recommends a special Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment be carried out on permafrost and national monitoring networks and adaptation plans be established.

It also says permafrost melt must be considered in the new global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, currently being discussed in Doha.

“The release of carbon dioxide and methane from warming permafrost is irreversible: once the organic matter thaws and decays away, there is no way to put it back into the permafrost,” said Kevin Schaefer, lead-author of the report from the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

“Anthropogenic emissions’ targets in the climate change treaty need to account for these emissions or we risk overshooting the 2°C maximum warming,” said Schaefer.

KEVIN M. SCHAEFER from

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Scientist, Prosper Sabongo (Candidat PHD) measuring the evolution of the tree named Funtunia Africana - Forest Reserve near the Village of Masako, Kisangani RDC (Source: Ollivier Girard)

Policy makers seeking to reduce greenhouse gases from deforestation cannot ignore the levels of nitrous oxide and methane released into the atmosphere as part of land conversion for palm oil, soya bean and other crops, scientists say.

While these forgotten gases account for only a small fraction of total greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, nitrous oxide is up to 300 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere when compared to carbon dioxide over a 100-year time period. Methane is 25 times more effective, says Kristell Hergoualc’h, a scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

As such, they need to start being a bigger part of the climate change debate.

Forest degradation and conversion are responsible for around 12 percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions – the majority of which is carbon dioxide released from forest fires and deforestation.

Deforestation itself is not a major contributor to nitrogen and methane gas emissions, however conversion to make way for crops and livestock (an average cow is thought to emit 600 litres of methane per day through belching and exhalation), and the use of nitrogen-based fertilisers to boost agricultural yields is increasing atmospheric levels of these two gases.

Emissions from peatlands and mangroves

Peatlands and mangroves are well known for their huge carbon-storing potential – mangrove soils alone store up to 4 times more carbon than trees – however, less is known about methane and nitrous oxide emissions, which may be important for their global warming potential, warns Hergoualc’h.

“We need to know the extent to which land-use change contributes to global warming, as this is likely to accelerate in the future,” she said.

The accurate monitoring and reporting of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is essential for countries participating in climate mitigation schemes, such as reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) – a scheme that pays developing countries for the carbon stored in trees and soils.

If you want to get involved or comment on forests week you can contact us on ts@rtcc.org or follow the week’s reports on Twitter via #ForestWeek.

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“For REDD+ to be successful, you need to prove that you are having an impact and that means being able to quantify the transfer of carbon and other greenhouse gases from the ecosystem to the atmosphere,” said Lou Verchot, CIFOR’s leading scientist on the Global Comparative Study on REDD+.

One of the goals of the four-year study is helping developing countries to develop robust monitoring, reporting and verifying (MRV) systems in order to accurately measure their effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This is a huge technical challenge, says Verchot, especially for countries that lack historical data and the technology to monitor their rates of deforestation, forest degradation and carbon stocks.

In Indonesia, 60 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions come from land-use change, in part, fuelled by the growing demand for palm oil and agricultural crops. Over 60% of mangroves and 45% of peat lands  have already disappeared to meet these demands.

At the same time, fertilisers used to boost yields of palm oil plants in converted landscapes, such as Sumatra, are causing significant nitrous oxide emissions.

“When the peat is cleared, the natural nitrogen found in the soil is not available for plants, so to ensure that the young oil palms thrive, intensive fertiliser is added during the first three to four years of the plantation. When fertiliser is added it stimulates microbes in the soil that convert nitrogen to nitrous oxide” explains Hergoualc’h.

“We need to find ways to reduce these emissions caused by fertilisation without reducing the productivity of the system,” she added.

Further research is also needed to understand how climate change mitigation activities might be contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, especially when considering biofuel production.

For example, a previous study shows that biofuels may actually be having a negative impact on the environment. It warns that biodiesel crops (such as Jatropha and soy) that require intensive nitrogen fertilisation could “contribute as much or more to global warming by nitrous oxide emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings”.

Similarly CIFOR research suggests that the rewetting of drained peat – a measure to prevent carbon emissions released from forest fires and peat degradation- could increase levels of methane from the soil. Overall the potential methane emission increases would likely be offset by carbon dioxide emission reductions but much more research is needed to quantify these amounts.

Policymakers will need take into account the full impact of land-use changes to “assess their true impact” on the atmosphere, argues Verchot.

“Although in terms of peatlands and mangroves, the big story is about carbon dioxide, we must not underestimate the combined impact of all three gases from these ecosystems.”

Catriona Moss is a writer for the Forests News blog at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

CIFOR is a nonprofit, global facility dedicated to advancing human wellbeing, environmental conservation and equity. Their research and expert analysis helps policy makers and practitioners shape effective policy, improve the management of tropical forests and address the needs and perspectives of people who depend on forests for their livelihoods. 

Other Forest Week Articles:

VIDEO: Why it’s time time to protect biodiversity – nature’s safety net

Second generation of biofuels could give forests a break

Agricultural expansion: an “either or more” factor in deforestation

Video: Uniting climate change adaptation and mitigation in the Congo Basin

Challenges mount for REDD+ as scheme prepares for implementation

The role of forests in combating climate change

Five facts you may have forgotten about forests

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