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agricultural emissions

Nitrogen fertliser, being added to bare earth, Canterbury, adding to climate change as it converts to nitrous oxide

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By: Anita Wreford, Lincoln University, New Zealand; John Tobias Saunders, Lincoln University, New Zealand, and Meike Guenther, Lincoln University, New Zealand

 Republished in full from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. See the original article: April 12, 2023


The recent report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underscores the urgency of emissions reductions. For Aotearoa New Zealand, where 50% of emissions come from agriculture in the form of methane and nitrous oxide, this means the primary sector must be part of the response.

New Zealand is indeed the first country to investigate introducing a price on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.

The most recent pricing proposals would require farmers to pay a levy on their agricultural emissions. To begin with, only 5% of emissions would be priced, with proposals to reduce the 95% free allocation gradually over time.

Much of the existing modelling shows emissions could be cut by up to 10% by reducing the intensity of production, often through lowering animal numbers and fertiliser use. This doesn’t necessarily mean lower profitability. With good pasture management, farmers may be able to reduce stocking rates and increase profits.

But Aotearoa is already one of the most efficient producers of meat and dairy products globally. If we reduce emissions here, will that not simply lead to other, less efficient countries picking up the lost production, while our farmers pay the price?

This idea is known as “carbon leakage” and is often used as an argument against any domestic policy that could result in reduced agricultural production. The issue is important as New Zealand depends heavily on agricultural exports. In 2022, of all merchandise trade, 65% were agricultural commodities.

Understanding whether carbon leakage will occur or not is a complex task. Here, we look at what evidence we have and insights from agricultural trade modelling.

New Zealand modelling

It’s difficult to know exactly what might happen in agriculture, as emissions pricing on agricultural products has not yet been used elsewhere. There is no historical evidence to draw on.

International modelling studies present a mixed picture of the likelihood of leakage: an OECD study estimated 34% of agricultural emissions would be leaked, mostly to developing countries.

Recent modelling for New Zealand examines a series of scenarios of domestic pricing on its own as well as international pricing. The results show that for the current proposal where only 5% of emissions are priced to begin with, with a 1% increase each year, New Zealand’s production of meat and dairy products could decline by 2050.

The effect on dairy producers would be a loss of returns of under 1%, while meat producers would face a 6% decline. Some of the production would be taken up by other countries, but the overall volume would be lower than in the baseline situation, where no emissions pricing existed.

This graph shows the displacement of global dairy production in 2050, resulting from a levy on 5% of emissions from 2025, and increasing by 1% annually.
This graph shows the displacement of global dairy production in 2050, resulting from a levy on 5% of emissions from 2025, and increasing by 1% annually. Author provided, CC BY-ND

This shows leakage may occur, with reductions in production of New Zealand dairy products. But global meat and dairy production by 2050 would be considerably lower than without the policy, which would have a positive overall impact on the climate.

As the proportion of emissions that are priced increases, we expect the quantity of meat and dairy produced in New Zealand to decrease. This in turn could increase the volume of leakage. –

More sustainable future diets

It is important to remember that although there is a reduction in meat and dairy production, there is likely to be an increase in the production of other types of food which doesn’t contribute so much to climate change.

A recent study shows how food consumption alone could contribute an additional degree of warming above preindustrial temperatures by 2100. This demonstrates the importance of food choices in addressing climate change.

Many of New Zealand’s trading partners are exploring and beginning to implement their own agricultural emissions-reduction goals and targets. Internationally, there is an increasing focus on the role international trade rules can play in addressing climate change, including border carbon adjustment mechanisms and environmental standards for imports.

In a similar scenario as described above, but where New Zealand’s main competitors also take action, New Zealand may actually see a small increase in production by 2050, despite the domestic pricing policy.

The extent of leakage therefore really depends on how other countries tackle their own emissions. Economy-wide net zero emissions targets are in place for Australia, Chile, European Union countries, the US and the UK by 2050, and for China by 2060.

The opportunity for leakage would be significantly reduced through multilateral agreements or through regional or bilateral commitments within trade agreements.

New Zealand could decide to be a leader and demonstrate to the rest of the world a commitment to reducing emissions from our highest emitting sector. This may result in some leakage initially, but this would likely decline as other countries take similar action.

Or we can wait until other countries begin to take more serious action on agricultural emissions. But in the meantime, emissions reductions will increasingly be driven through finance and private-sector initiatives, for example through access to processing companies, which are progressively requiring emissions reductions throughout their value chains and through lending and finance, where banks are beginning to offer reduced interest rates for sustainable practices.The Conversation

fire

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By: Professor of Energy and Climate Change, University of Manchester. Republished in full from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. See the original article: March 25, 2023

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) synthesis report recently landed with an authoritative thump, giving voice to hundreds of scientists endeavouring to understand the unfolding calamity of global heating. What’s changed since the last one in 2014? Well, we’ve dumped an additional third of a trillion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere, primarily from burning fossil fuels. While world leaders promised to cut global emissions, they have presided over a 5% rise.

The new report evokes a mild sense of urgency, calling on governments to mobilise finance to accelerate the uptake of green technology. But its conclusions are far removed from a direct interpretation of the IPCC’s own carbon budgets (the total amount of CO₂ scientists estimate can be put into the atmosphere for a given temperature rise).

The report claims that, to maintain a 50:50 chance of warming not exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, CO₂ emissions must be cut to “net-zero” by the “early 2050s”. Yet, updating the IPCC’s estimate of the 1.5°C carbon budget, from 2020 to 2023, and then drawing a straight line down from today’s total emissions to the point where all carbon emissions must cease, and without exceeding this budget, gives a zero CO₂ date of 2040.

Graph with lines
 A full description of the above chart is available here.
 
If emissions stay at their current levels, we will exhaust the 50% chance of 1.5°C in 9 years. If we begin to immediately cut emissions following the blue line, then to stay within the carbon budget for 50:50 chance of not exceeding 1.5°C we need zero global emissions by 2040. The vertical axis represents how much carbon is emitted each year – note the pandemic-related blip in 2020.
 

Given it will take a few years to organise the necessary political structures and technical deployment, the date for eliminating all CO₂ emissions to remain within 1.5°C of warming comes closer still, to around the mid-2030s. This is a strikingly different level of urgency to that evoked by the IPCC’s “early 2050s”. Similar smoke and mirrors lie behind the “early 2070s” timeline the IPCC conjures for limiting global heating to 2°C.

IPCC science embeds colonial attitudes

For over two decades, the IPCC’s work on cutting emissions (what experts call “mitigation”) has been dominated by a particular group of modellers who use huge computer models to simulate what may happen to emissions under different assumptions, primarily related to price and technology. I’ve raised concerns before about how this select cadre, almost entirely based in wealthy, high-emitting nations, has undermined the necessary scale of emission reductions.

In 2023, I can no longer tiptoe around the sensibilities of those overseeing this bias. In my view, they have been as damaging to the agenda of cutting emissions as Exxon was in misleading the public about climate science. The IPCC’s mitigation report in 2022 did include a chapter on “demand, services and social aspects” as a repository for alternative voices, but these were reduced to an inaudible whisper in the latest report’s influential summary for policymakers.

The specialist modelling groups (referred to as Integrated Assessment Modelling, or IAMs) have successfully crowded out competing voices, reducing the task of mitigation to price-induced shifts in technology – some of the most important of which, like so-called “negative emissions technologies”, are barely out of the laboratory.

The IPCC offers many “scenarios” of future low-carbon energy systems and how we might get there from here. But as the work of academic Tejal Kanitkar and others has made clear, not only do these scenarios prefer speculative technology tomorrow over deeply challenging policies today (effectively a greenwashed business-as-usual), they also systematically embed colonial attitudes towards “developing nations”.

With few if any exceptions, they maintain current levels of inequality between developed and developing nations, with several scenarios actually increasing the levels of inequality. Granted, many IAM modellers strive to work objectively, but they do so within deeply subjective boundaries established and preserved by those leading such groups.

Four people in formal attire converse on a stage behind a
March 2023’s synthesis report capped eight years of research. IISD/ENB/Anastasia Rodopoulou

 

What happened to equity?

If we step outside the rarefied realm of IAM scenarios that leading climate scientist Johan Rockström describes as “academic gymnastics that have nothing to do with reality”, it’s clear that not exceeding 1.5°C or 2°C will require fundamental changes to most facets of modern life.

Starting now, to not exceed 1.5°C of warming requires 11% year-on-year cuts in emissions, falling to nearer 5% for 2°C. However, these global average rates ignore the core concept of equity, central to all UN climate negotiations, which gives “developing country parties” a little longer to decarbonise.

Include equity and most “developed” nations need to reach zero CO₂ emissions between 2030 and 2035, with developing nations following suit up to a decade later. Any delay will shrink these timelines still further.

Most IAM models ignore and often even exacerbate the obscene inequality in energy use and emissions, both within nations and between individuals. As the International Energy Agency recently reported, the top 10% of emitters accounted for nearly half of global CO₂ emissions from energy use in 2021, compared with 0.2% for the bottom 10%. More disturbingly, the greenhouse gas emissions of the top 1% are 1.5 times those of the bottom half of the world’s population.

So where does this leave us? In wealthier nations, any hope of arresting global heating at 1.5 or 2°C demands a technical revolution on the scale of the post-war Marshall Plan. Rather than relying on technologies such as direct air capture of CO₂ to mature in the near future, countries like the UK must rapidly deploy tried-and-tested technologies.

Retrofit housing stock, shift from mass ownership of combustion-engine cars to expanded zero-carbon public transport, electrify industries, build new homes to Passivhaus standard, roll-out a zero-carbon energy supply and, crucially, phase out fossil fuel production.

Three decades of complacency has meant technology on its own cannot now cut emissions fast enough. A second, accompanying phase, must be the rapid reduction of energy and material consumption.

Given deep inequalities, this, and deploying zero-carbon infrastructure, is only possible by re-allocating society’s productive capacity away from enabling the private luxury of a few and austerity for everyone else, and towards wider public prosperity and private sufficiency.

For most people, tackling climate change will bring multiple benefits, from affordable housing to secure employment. But for those few of us who have disproportionately benefited from the status quo, it means a profound reduction in how much energy we use and stuff we accumulate.

The question now is, will we high-consuming few make (voluntarily or by force) the fundamental changes needed for decarbonisation in a timely and organised manner? Or will we fight to maintain our privileges and let the rapidly changing climate do it, chaotically and brutally, for us?

The differences in resources used to grow meat versus cellular agriculture

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Reposted from Coalition Footprint:

In a historic first for the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has certified that Upside Foods chicken made from cell cultures is safe to eat.

Nearly two years after Singapore approved the Good Meat company’s cellular chicken for sale at select restaurants in the Asian foodtech hub, and Supermeat opened a restaurant in Israel serving cultured chicken on its menu, U.S. buyers will soon get the chance to taste a potential future of food for themselves.

California-based Upside Foods is the first company to receive a pre-market safety clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While the pending facility for Upside Foods will need to meet U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and FDA requirements, the agency said it has “no further questions at this time” about the meat’s safety.

Issued on November 16, the approval could open the door for other cultured meat in the U.S. including the FootPrint Coalition-backed salmon biotechnology company WildType.

Cultured meat is made from cell samples taken from animals. It’s different from plant-based meat, like that of popular brands Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat and FPC brands MyForest Foods and Motif FoodWorks.

Using muscle samples, stem cells from animals, and fats animal tissue is “cultivated” from tiny samples into large portions of meat. In Upside’s case, the startup uses chicken’s primary cells of a fertilized egg to create “The fried chicken chicken’s dream about.

Different from plant-based, companies like Upside and Wild Type offer diners the option of real meat without the requirement of animal death or the meat industry’s environmental consequences and contributions to the climate crisis. The meats also have lower risk of contamination from bacteria because they’re not slaughtered. It is still animal meat, which means the target audience isn’t the vegetarians and vegans of the world, but their carnivorous counterparts.

The United Nations estimates the meat industry accounts for nearly a fifth of our total greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the most polluting industries in the world, especially in the US, one of the planet’s most meat-consuming countries.

According to a study published at the University of Oxford, cultivated meat could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 96% compared to conventionally produced meat.

Additionally, switching to cultured meat can cut our water consumption between 82 and 96%, depending on the animal. It can also reduce the quantity of land dedicated to the meat industry, which is the main driver of tropical deforestation and land degradation.

Keep reading:

methane producing machines

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This is a submission on behalf of the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) on the Government’s Discussion Document Te Tātai utu o nā tukunga: Pricing Agricultural Emissions.

The submission responds to the schedule of questions included in the discussion document, reproduced in full with permission from Gary Taylor Chief Executive, Environmental Defence Society:

Question 1: Do you think modifications are required to the proposed farm-level levy system to ensure it delivers sufficient reductions in gross emissions from the agriculture sector? Please explain.

If farmers are to balk at the proposal as indicated by recent statements from Federated Farmers and others, and widespread non-compliance follows, then implementing a processor-level system would be a practical way forward. It is alarming how some farmers are signalling an unwillingness to comply with the rule of law. The farm-level option (which has benefits in sending price signals to individual famers) may therefore not be workable at least in the short term. Processors could develop their own incentive arrangements for their suppliers and some have experience in doing that already.

Question 2: Are tradeable methane quotas an option the Government should consider further in the future? Why?

There may be benefit in seeing the levy system as a transition to a cap and trade system. This means the levy system should be designed so that such a transition could occur. The cap should be set (and reviewed from time to time) by the Climate Change Commission (Commission) at the level that achieves the reduction targets. If Ministers were to make the decisions, then there should be transparent criteria in place, and they should be advised on the appropriate level by the Commission.

Question 3: Which option do you prefer for pricing agricultural emissions by 2025 and why?

A farm-level levy system, with fertiliser in the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), would give individual farmers incentives to reduce emissions and reward those doing so. However, that may be an impractical option given that some farmers seem determined to not cooperate with any system. For that reason, we favour a pragmatic approach where pricing is set at the processor level, which would help avoid non-compliance. Processors could then develop incentives that would apply to their supplier cohort. There are also questions around whether a farm-level system could be developed in time.

Prices should be set either directly by the Commission, or if by Ministers, on the advice of the Commission and subject to transparent criteria.

Fertiliser should come under the ETS which would mean all fertiliser users are captured and the price signal applies across the sector.

Question 4: Do you support the proposed approach for reporting of emissions? Why, and what improvements should be considered?

Broadly yes but further work is needed to simplify the reporting system and ensure the obligations are proportional to the need.

Question 5: Do you support the proposed approach to setting levy prices? Why, and what improvements should be considered?

Price setting cannot be the responsibility of the sector itself. It must be independent and linked to the methane reductions required. As mentioned above, EDS favours this responsibility resting with the independent Commission (analogous to the Reserve Bank on interest rates). But if set by Ministers, then there should be clear decision-making criteria, and they should receive advice from the Commission. Further, the proposed ETS discount rates for long-lived gases are too generous given the persistent delays in bringing the sector into a pricing mechanism.

Question 6: Do you support the proposed approach to revenue recycling? Why, and what improvements should be considered?

Recycling revenue into finding new abatement approaches makes sense in theory, but the problem is that over $100m of public money has gone down that route since the early 2000s, with very little to show for it. If revenue is to go into research it needs to be to entities that offer prospect of deployment of real technologies into the field. Research criteria therefore need to focus on deployment.

The answer to emissions mitigation is to reduce land use intensity. Some compensation for that might also be needed given the farming sector has simply been following the economic signals to date. There is virtue in the model of low-impact pastoral farming with indigenous forestry, and recycling could support that kind of transition.

The big gap in the policy settings, at present, is the lack of strong and effective incentives for indigenous afforestation. Revenue recycling should be used to create such incentives, given the longer term sequestration and biodiversity benefits that would follow.

Further consideration should be given to whether revenue from the levy should also be used to support farmers needing assistance with adaptation crises on the farm (such as droughts and floods).

Question 7: Do you support the proposed approach for incentive payments to encourage additional emissions reductions? Why, and what improvements should be considered?

The price signals should be robust enough to incentivise the emission reductions required. Otherwise the sector is getting disproportional assistance / subsidies from the Government over other sectors.

Question 8: Do you support the proposed approach for recognising carbon sequestration from riparian plantings and management of indigenous vegetation, both in the short and long term? Why, and what improvements should be considered?

Two approaches are required here.

The first is to create a biodiversity incentive payment to support native forest and related plantings or regeneration. The proposed interim approach will achieve that, in part, but biodiversity enhancements need to be considered in the broader context and be designed to encourage and support native forest restoration at landscape scale.

The second is to ban permanent exotic carbon forests in the ETS.

The first approach can help support related government policies such as the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity. The second would prevent widespread monocultures with their attendant adverse landscape impacts and fire and disease risks.

Question 9: Do you support the introduction of an interim processor-level levy in 2025 if the farm-level system is not ready? If not, what alternative would you propose to ensure agricultural emissions pricing starts in 2025?

Yes. In fact we think that should be the way forward in any event.

Question 10: Do you think the proposed system for pricing agricultural emissions is equitable, both within the agriculture sector, and across other sectors, and across New Zealand generally? Why and what changes to the system would be required to make it equitable?

It is time that the sector played its part in mitigating the impacts of climate change. It has got away with too much, for too long, and continuing taxpayer subsidy and support and the proposed incremental nature of the pricing obligations continue that approach. It is inequitable for the primary sector to be relying on others which are paying their way through the ETS.

With respect to Māori landowners, there may be a case for some interim support given they appear to be disproportionately impacted by the proposal. The best way to do that is to create a special category in the ETS for native forest regeneration and establishment that gives a long-term revenue stream as good as or better than permanent exotic carbon forests.

Question 11: In principle, do you think the agricultural sector should pay for any shortfall in its emissions reductions? If so, do you think using levy revenue would be an appropriate mechanism for this?

Yes and that calculation should be made by the Commission.

Question 12: What impacts or implications do you foresee as a result of each of the Government’s proposals in the short and long term?

Unless the Government’s proposals are enacted, we see widespread planting of permanent exotic carbon forests and rural non-compliance with the law. There will be some emission reductions, but the sector will continue to hold out on meeting its fair share, as it has since 2002. The climate will continue to warm with consequent droughts, floods and sea-level rise and farmers will continue to hold out their hands for Government support when impacted.

Question 13: What steps should the Crown be taking to protect relevant iwi and Māori interests, in line with Te Tiriti o Waitangi? How should the Crown support Māori land owners, farmers and growers in a pricing system?

By changing the pricing incentives to favour permanent native forests over permanent exotic ones. Māori landowners have indicated a preference for natives but the pricing incentives are going the wrong way.

Question 14: Do you support the proposed approach for verification, compliance and enforcement? Why, and what improvements should be considered?

Yes.

Question 15: Do you have any other priority issues that you would like to share on the Government’s proposals for addressing agricultural emissions?

The glaring gap is the absence of the right pricing incentives to encourage native forest restoration that would lead to a virtuous mixed land use in which native forests offset some on-farm emissions over time.

Ends.

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The science is unequivocal. The 12-minute video above succinctly outlines this complex issue. The figures at the bottom of this page are eye-watering…and that’s just from processing meat and dairy.

“From production to transportation packaging use and waste management, based on the most detailed meta analysis of life cycle assessments to date, on average it takes 71kg of CO2 to produce 1kg of beef. For lamb, it’s about 40kg; pigs 12kg; and poultry 10kg.

“Some 26% of greenhouse gasses comes from agriculture. By far the largest share is methane and nitrous oxide from cattle. Methane alone has already caused caused around 24-40% of human-made warming.

“The destruction of forests for farmland not only releases the CO2 that was bound in the flora, it sets free carbon that was stored in the soil and destroys its ability to store it in the future. This aspect accounts for much of the range of emissions in beef.”

This loss continues in Aotearoa (13,000 hectares lost in the past 5 years alone). Then there’s the nitrogen and phosphates added to farms that ends up in waterways, which results in, amongst other things, algae blooms that emit methane when they die:

“Between 1991 and 2019, estimates from sales data of nitrogen applied to land in fertiliser increased from 62,000 to 452,000 tonnes (just over a sixfold increase, 629 percent).

“Since our last update of this indicator in April 2019, there was a 5.4 percent increase from 2015 to 2019 in nitrogen applied from fertiliser. In this period, urease inhibitor use increased 48 percent.” – Statistics NZ

And then there’s the palm oil imported to feed our ‘grass fed’ cows:

“A new Greenpeace International report has found evidence of systematic violations by the Indonesian Government regarding plantation and forest release permits in the Papua region. The report also finds that clearing forest for palm plantations in the Papua area could release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, undoing previous climate action. 

“New Zealand is the world’s biggest importer of palm kernel expeller–a product of the palm industry used as supplementary feed for New Zealand’s 6.5 million dairy cows. 

“In 2018, a Greenpeace investigation found that Fonterra’s key supplier of PKE, Wilmar International, has been linked with the mass destruction of rainforest in Papua, Indonesia. In 2020, Fonterra handed over its half of PKE-importing business Agrifeeds to business partnerWilmar International. 

“Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner Amanda Larsson says the dairy industry’s continued use of PKE is one of myriad ways that intensive dairying is fuelling the climate crisis. 

“Right now, dairying is New Zealand’s biggest climate polluter. We’ve got methane from 6.5 million cows, nitrous oxide from cows and synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and carbon from the coal used to process milk,” says Larsson.” – Greenpeace April, 2021

Finally, there’s the carbon cost of processing all that meat and dairy. Remember, this is in addtion to the methane, nitrous oxide and CO2 emissions from growing this meat on farms. Fonterra is the worst carbon polluter in the country, emitting a staggering 16.3 million tonnes of eCO2 in 2020 alone. Silver Fern farms emitted 8.3 million tonnes (Table 9 below: from the New Zealand Government EPA report ‘ETS Participant Emissions‘, October 2021, pages 27-30).

So yes, meat and dairy really is that bad for the climate.

Greenhouse gas emissions from Fonterra and other dairy and meat processors New Zealand

More information