NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre director Dr Harry Clark says despite the focus from the latest IPCC report on non-agricultural GHGs, NZ’s ag sector needs to keep in mind changes that still need to be made.
The focus on areas of the economy other than agriculture in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is because the potential to reduce worldwide emissions through agriculture is not as high as it is in other sectors, such as energy and transport, New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre director Dr Harry Clark says.
However, that does not give NZ agriculture a free pass to carry on as it has in the past and it will need to keep in mind the pathway that the Climate Change Commission (CCC) has recommended to the Government for it to reduce its emissions.
That’s not something that is going to go away.
Clark said from his reading of the report, it’s asking the question “what is the major gas (in terms of GHG emissions) and what’s not happening?”
He said for most countries the biggest problem is carbon dioxide.
“Carbon dioxide (emissions) have to be reduced and we’ve got to have very rapid cuts,” Clark said.
“They’re saying that, unless (CO2) emissions stabilise in three years, then we’ve lost the 1.5-degree target,” referring to the goal adopted by signatories of the Paris Agreement of keeping the average global temperature rise from pre-industrial levels to that level if the worst consequences of climate change are to be avoided.
He said the reason why CO2 has become the focus is because of the acknowledgement that, even with the reduction targets that countries are working on, it’s not going to be enough.
“What they are now saying is ‘actually, we have to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere’,” he said.
“When it comes to the other gases (livestock gases such as methane and nitrous oxide), yes, they have got to be reduced but they don’t have to be reduced to zero.
“It (the report) focuses on getting across that, for most countries, carbon dioxide is the major gas, and if we’re going to tackle this problem globally, then it is the gas that has to be reduced. And very rapidly.”
Clark’s view is that while it is important for agricultural countries such as NZ to reduce agricultural gases, agriculture does not figure highly with many countries.
“For the majority of countries, it’s not an agricultural issue. For us it may be, but not for the majority,” he said.
He said the agriculture chapter of the report acknowledges that it is difficult to reduce methane emissions from the sector.
“It says emissions from agriculture are hard to reduce because there is a balance between things like economic growth, food production etc, and the technologies aren’t necessarily there yet, so agriculture is difficult,” he said.
“The other point it makes, and this applies generically but it certainly applies to agriculture, is that despite a lot of talk about technologies available, or potential technologies, what’s been happening to agricultural emissions?
“They’ve been going up.
“There’s this talk about we should all change our diets, but what’s actually been happening?
“Meat consumption is going up, so animal numbers have gone up.
“There’s a recognition that the (world’s) growing population has driven a number of actions: they need more food, which has been catered for but unfortunately the consequence of that is emissions go up.
“That does pose a big problem for agriculture.
“So how do you bring emissions down that arise from food production when there are more mouths to feed and when the diets that people are choosing to have in practice contain animal products?
“It doesn’t let agriculture off the hook, but it (the report) does say it’s a difficult problem.”
However, Clark said it is still important for NZ agriculture to meet targets that will be set by the Government’s emissions reduction plan, which will be influenced by CCC recommendations made last year and is due next month.
He agrees with the IPCC report’s finding that while emerging technology to address methane and nitrous oxide emissions in agriculture is promising, challenges remain.
“There are technical issues with some of these things,” he said.
“How many of them have gone beyond the research stage? Yes, some have gone past that, but they are not necessarily applicable to all agricultural systems.”
He gives the example of DSM’s Bovear methane inhibitor, which is designed for housed animals fed through the TMR (total mixed ration) method of feeding dairy cows, not NZ’s pastoral-based system.
“You come back to the question of what (farming) systems are they applicable to and quite a lot of things aren’t applicable to all systems,” he said.
“I think it is fair to say we’ve got potential, but that potential is far from being realised at the moment.
“The idea of a specific technology to reduce emissions, a lot of them are very much in the development phase and it will be a few years before they are available on-farm.
“You can’t hand on heart say to a farmer in NZ, ‘here’s the magic pill, just go and feed that once a day’.”
