• The UN has released an urgent call to reduce methane reductions worldwide, which it says will slow the impact of climate change.
• Australia’s beef industry, a major contributor to national methane emissions, released its own sustainability report this week.
• But the two entities differ greatly in strategy, suggesting a growing gap between climate activists and established industries.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

The United Nations has released an urgent call to reduce methane emissions worldwide, underscoring the role of Australia’s $20 billion beef industry — which this week renewed its pledge to become carbon neutral by 2030.

But the UN report champions a radical turn away from beef as a food source, raising questions about the industry’s ability to meet its lofty emission reduction goal.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, which has a global warming potential many times higher than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year period.

But the warming potential of atmospheric methane is short-lived compared to other greenhouse gases, meaning efforts to minimise emissions could have near-immediate benefits.

In its Global Methane Assessment, released Friday, the United Nations Environment Programme says global action to reduce methane emissions could yield demonstrable results within the decade.

“Available targeted methane measures, together with additional measures that contribute to priority development goals, can simultaneously reduce human-caused methane emissions by as much as 45 per cent” by 2030, the report states.

That would be enough to avoid a 0.3 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures through the 2040s, the UN states, supplementing efforts to reduce other greenhouse gases, and helping to mitigate the worst consequences of a heating planet.

The report notes another key difference between methane and carbon dioxide: while the bulk of man-made carbon emissions result from fossil fuel use, 32% of anthropogenic methane emissions originate from livestock.

When cows digest feed, they produce methane gas through a process called ‘enteric fermentation’. Put simply, this results in methane-dense farts and burps, which float into the atmosphere — and contribute to the greenhouse gas effect.

Updating the new feeds

These emissions form a key component of the Australian Beef Sustainability Framework’s 2021 update, revealed this week for the triennial Beef Australia industry expo.

In addition to improving land management practices, reducing the energy expended in meat processing, and capturing emissions from wastewater, the report posits a CSIRO-backed feed — which reduces livestock methane production — could grow in prevalence industry-wide.

The FutureFeed formulation, which supplements traditional food sources with methane-reducing seaweed, “could improve farm profitability and will tackle climate change without negatively impacting on livestock productivity,” the report states.

The breakthrough development has been acknowledged by the UN, which notes that feed laced with small quantities of the seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis were shown in studies to reduce cow methane production by up to 99%.

But “further studies are needed to confirm benefits and explore the potential for scaling up these practices,” the UN stated.

And, for all the positive progress Australia’s livestock industry has made, net neutrality remains an ambitious goal.

The beef industry’s carbon-equivalent emissions were 51.4% of 2005 levels in 2018 — a slight uptick from 2017 levels. And the report notes the quantity of greenhouse gases captured and reused during processing has actually fallen since 2014.

For methane reductions, the choice is do or diet

The UN report differs from the industry statement in another key area — while Australia’s livestock sector wants to adapt, the UN has suggested a wholesale turn away from beef.

Combined with improved livestock management and waste reduction, “the adoption of healthy diets (vegetarian or with a lower meat and dairy content) could reduce methane emissions by 65–80 [megatonnes a year] over the next few decades,” the report states.

The Red Meat Advisory Council has directly attacked similar arguments, with independent chair John McKillop using the sustainability framework to rail against “disinformation” from “animal liberation activists or manufactured plant-based protein corporations”.

“As an industry, we need to unite against disinformation and use tools like the Sustainability Framework to chart a positive course forward,” he said.

For now, the UN and Australia’s livestock industry share the same goals, but with very different ideas about how to get there.

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