Methane emissions should be cut by 13-16pc according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and not the 10pc that has been agreed under the Food Vision 2030 strategy.
he EPA says a larger cut in methane emissions than the 10pc committed to by the sector is needed for Ireland to meet its climate targets.
The EPA made the comments in a submission on the draft Food Vision 2030 strategy seen by this paper, and said the current plan would not be enough to meet “even the lower level of greenhouse gas emission reductions committed to in the Climate Action Plan 2019”.
In the document, the EPA stressed the strategy must be consistent with the Climate Action Plan 2019 and the forthcoming Climate Action Plan 2021. In particular, it said the base year to which the 10pc reduction in biogenic methane applies needs to be specified and how this reduction links with the greenhouse gas emissions reduction committed to in the Climate Action Plan 2019.
“The EPA estimates that methane needs to be reduced 13-16pc to be consistent with the lower level of ambition in the Climate Action Plan 2019 of 16.5Mt greenhouse gas emission reductions. This is based on the EPA’s ongoing work on the 2021 projections,” it said.
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The EPA also sought changes to the draft strategy that would see it “be explicit on the environmental impact of the growing dairy herd and how this will be addressed to ensure a reversal of the negative environmental trends”.
It added that the discussion in the draft strategy “around stable herd size hides the fact that the absolute increase in dairy cow numbers is having a significant impact on the environment” and said that a comment in the draft strategy that “the pace of increase has slowed”, does not address the fact that the dairy herd continues to grow.
It comes as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report threw the spotlight on methane emission cuts as a means of staving off catastrophic global warming.
Since its publication, there has been intense debate over how biogenic methane from cattle should be accounted due to its unique characteristics.
Thomas Duffy, chairman of the Signpost Farms Steering Group, an initiative to improve the environmental performance of Irish farms, said that while over the longer term such metrics will be important in determining the extent of cuts required, in the short term, “no matter what measurements you use, methane cuts matter”.
“We need to reduce methane. Decoupling the national herd from methane is an easy and hard thing to do. However, it is entirely possible many individual herds have already done it.
“They have increased their production by not increasing their herds and not increasing their feed. Essentially, increasing efficiency while having a stable herd will be the absolute key,” he said.
However, Duffy also stressed in order to meet Agriculture’s targets, a significant amount of additional funds beyond CAP would need to be put into farming and research.
