Climate scientists have criticised Ireland over proposed measures that would weaken the country’s commitments to reducing methane emissions.
Countries that export livestock – including Ireland and New Zealand – have proposed a new approach to climate targets, known as “temperature neutrality”.
Scientists say this method would undermine efforts to create a sustainable global food system as it allows countries to maintain high agricultural methane emissions while claiming to meet climate targets.
A study containing the warning, published in Environmental Research Letters today, was led by University of Galway researchers with input from scientists at University College Cork (UCC), University of Melbourne, and Climate Resource, which models climate scenarios.
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Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that traps significantly more heat than carbon dioxide over shorter periods, leading to accelerated warming.
“If every country adopted a temperature neutrality target, we’d seriously jeopardise the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees,” said lead researcher Dr Colm Duffy, a lecturer in agri-sustainability at University of Galway.
“Worse still, this approach doesn’t just weaken climate ambition, it entrenches inequality,” he added. “It protects the status quo for wealthy countries while placing an unfair burden on poorer, food-insecure countries, limiting their ability to grow their own food systems.”
This approach, the research concludes, “dramatically reduces the level of ambition needed for overall greenhouse-gas emission reduction”.
Revised targets using the new method were proposed to the Government by the Climate Change Advisory Council, an independent body, in part to reduce potential disruption from Ireland’s legal commitment to achieve national “climate neutrality” by 2050.
[ The difference between ‘net zero’ emissions and ‘temperature neutrality’ ]
It is understood the concept is favoured by the Department of Agriculture, but the Government has yet to adopt it.
Minister for Climate and Energy Darragh O’Brien has told the Oireachtas climate committee he has “not formed a definitive view on that one way or the other”. All views from experts, “who will have different views on this”, will be assessed in determining carbon budgets later this year, he said.
Temperature neutrality is based on stabilising a country’s contribution to global warming rather than aiming for the more demanding existing target of net zero emissions.
[ Ireland’s emissions trend ‘alarming and shocking, with actions reset required’Opens in new window ]
In effect, the researchers say, it requires modest reductions in methane from high-emitting countries, and denying methane emission “rights” to countries producing less of the gas.
As methane emissions are strongly linked with agricultural production, they say widespread adoption of temperature neutrality would lock in current inequalities in the global food system by reducing the need to curtail or offset methane emissions by current major livestock exporters.
The study shows “temperature neutrality severely restricts development space for agriculture in low-income, food-insecure countries where livestock products are most needed to improve nutrition”.
The researchers evaluated scenarios to assess impact from the policy – first proposed in New Zealand – on global mean temperatures. Apart from “business as usual”, the temperature neutrality approach performed the worst in terms of global warming emissions.
By 2050, Ireland’s per capita methane emissions would remain almost six times the global average, it finds.
Dr Duffy added: “The science shows the new policy essentially grandfathers methane emissions – meaning a country’s future share of warming is based not on equity or ambition, but on historical share of emissions. In essence; ‘I had more, so I get more’.”
UCC sustainable energy specialist Prof Hannah Daly said: “Methane emissions are responsible for around 40 per cent of global warming ... [its] short lifetime in the atmosphere means that cutting its emissions is an essential lever to limit global warming to safe levels.
“For a country like Ireland, with outsized methane emissions, to base our long-term climate target on simply stabilising warming is inadequate to meet our global obligations and sets a dangerous precedent.”
Dr Róisín Moriarty of UCC Sustainability Institute said: “A ‘no additional warming’ approach to target-setting amounts to backsliding on a country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement and is not a reflection of ‘highest possible ambition’.”
