In a new report entitled ‘Methane: keep up the momentum’, the Environment and Climate Change Committee has called on the government to produce a methane action plan that sets out steps for meeting its global commitment to reduce anthropogenic methane emissions, which are predominately caused by energy, agriculture and waste management.
The committee is concerned that the progress has slowed in the UK after initial achievements were made.
The report acknowledges the need to balance the “economic considerations of action and inaction”, but pointed to the continued rises in global methane concentrations and the need for the UK to become more engaged in international leadership.
Members of the committee spoke to fossil fuel and waste management experts, farmers, academics, scientists and ministers in preparation for the report.
Other recommendations include demanding greater transparency and accountability in the oil and gas of industry, identifying the most cost-effective traditional and cutting-edge technological options in agriculture to mitigate methane, ensuring the UK maintains world-leading waste management best practice and reviewing the existing regulatory framework across sectors to ensure a consistent approach.
Baroness Sheehan, chair of the Environment and Climate Change Committee, outlined the urgency needed in the response to rising methane emissions.
“In 2021 at the Glasgow COP, the UK helped launch the Global Methane Pledge, recognising methane’s potency as a greenhouse gas,” said Sheehan.
“Methane is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide and responsible for around thirty percent of the global warming we see to date. But here’s the gamechanger: it is much shorter-lived in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide so, rapidly decreasing emissions of methane can help cool the planet.”
Professor Piers Forster, interim chair of the UK Government’s advisory Climate Change Committee, has recently stressed that rapidly reducing methane emissions alongside addressing CO2 could reduce the current trajectory of global warming from 0.25C per decade to 0.1C per decade.
“With the globe expected to exceed the Paris 1.5°C temperature threshold in the very near future, every effort must be taken to buy time for carbon dioxide emissions to be reduced,” Sheehan continued.
“Methane also contributes to the formation of ground-level ozone, a dangerous air pollutant, so reducing methane has the co-benefit of improving air quality as well.
“Continued methane mitigation at home, but particularly leading on accelerated mitigation abroad, is therefore absolutely necessary. No momentum can be lost.”