Livestock methane only doing damage for 12 years? Trite claim, says Eckard

Professor Richard Eckard, arguably the premier expert on carbon farming accounting, has also slammed the much-touted claim that livestock methane is not as dangerous because it is only around for 12 years. He called that trite.

The push for Australian livestock to ditch Global Warming Potential-100 in favour of the newer metric known as GWP*, which considers the permanent rate of change in methane, is coming from both the peak body for grassfed producers, Cattle Australia, and other corners of the climate science world.

However, the University of Melbourne's Professor Eckard, director of the Primary Industries Climate Challenges Centre, said trying to change the metric was a waste of time and effort.

The world had assessed it and moved on.

Further, it would backfire on Australian beef.

Speaking at the 2024 Wagyu Edge conference in Cairns, Prof Eckard said Australian beef had to align with the international methodology in order to have any meaning in its carbon accounting.

GWP-100 would be the standard beef supply chains everywhere would use, he said.

The reason for internationally-agreed frameworks was integrity.

He spoke about the new Brazilian carbon neutral logo as an example.

"All they have done is offset methane from steers in the last two years of their life in a silvopasture system, forgetting about their entire breeder herd," Prof Eckard said.

"When the consumer finds out Brazilian CN beef is dodgy accounting, the penalty will be worse than the benefit."

Adding to the case for ignoring GWP*, he said, was the industry strategy to double the value of red meat sales by 2030, which had a subtext of strengthening herd numbers.

"Our plan is 5 million more cattle in this country," Prof Eckard said.

"Under GWP*, if your animal numbers are decreasing it gives you a nice outcome but if they are increasing it penalises you very heavily.

"The reason this metric will never get anywhere is that it tells us a Californian dairy farm that has the same animal numbers today it had 20 years ago, at 20,000 head, gets no penalty when in actual fact it is producing 3000 tonnes of methane per year.

"But a Kenyan dairy farmer who increases from one cow to two gets a $400 penalty for new methane produced.

"Which one actually warms the atmosphere more?

"This clearly creates inequity and as such, it has been dealt with already on a global level."

Meanwhile, the line that methane is in the atmosphere for only 12 years ignores the damage function which goes on for hundreds, if not thousands of years, Prof Eckard said.

"So the 12 years it's in the atmosphere it is warming us 128 times more per day than carbon dioxide. That extra heat load goes into the deep ocean and is dealt with for years to come.

"We can't run with trite claims."

Prof Eckard said reducing methane emissions was no simple task but ultimately was what the industry had to be working towards.

Already banks and investors were identifying a fundamental difference between carbon offsets through sequestration and reduced emissions.

"Our first wake up call is the fact the ruminant took 50 million years of evolution to deliver the stable composition it now has," Prof Eckard said.

"Around 30 years ago we decided methane was a problem and we threw three-year funding rounds at research to fix it.

"It's ridiculous to think we'd have the answer by now.

"When someone comes along and says here's a vial of 250mls of magic potion, pop it in the rumen and methane will be a gone problem, think about the number of microbes in the rumen fluid - 10 to the power of 11 - that have taken 50m years to become the most effective of their kind."

In another statement some players in the livestock carbon space probably wouldn't like, Prof Eckard said soil carbon change in a 12-month period was nonsense.

"There is a 30 per cent error in our ability to measure this thing called soil carbon," he said.

"You can't measure above the noise in less than five years. We need to get rid of the rainfall variability driving change we are claiming.

"Where we are headed with soil and tree carbon under Climate Active (the federal government carbon emission measurement program) is not to allow one-year changes to be claimed."