Opportunities to Reduce Methane Emissions from Global Agriculture

Quickly reducing methane emissions is an important strategy for meeting 2050 climate targets because of the powerful radiative forcing of methane and its relatively short lifetime, but this strategy is undermined by rapidly rising emissions. Agriculture contributes around 40-46% of global methane emissions, and because of rising food production, these emissions are on a path to increase roughly 40% by 2050. Of these emissions, two-thirds are from enteric methane from ruminant livestock, roughly 20% are from rice, and 7% are from managed manure. Although mitigation efforts for agriculture have received less attention, we set forth a credible scenario to decrease these emissions by 54% relative to otherwise likely emissions in 2050 and by 36% compared to present emission levels. Mitigation opportunities include: (1) increasing the feed efficiency of ruminant livestock; (2) rapid development and deployment of promising enteric methane inhibitors; (3) realizing an “Optimistic Trend Projection” for consumption of ruminant meat, which relies more heavily on alternative sources of animal protein; (4) deployment of at least one basic water level drawdown in flooded rice fields plus better offseason management of residues; (5) broad use of at least one method of reducing methane emissions from manure managed in wet form; and (6) reductions in global food loss and waste. Other innovative ideas are also promising. To achieve this mitigation, we suggest in the near-term an internationally coordinated effort to develop “shovel-ready” projects using known mitigation options but structured to encourage innovation and to improve our understanding of how to reduce emissions further. We also suggest a series of internationally coordinated R&D projects and demonstration projects of promising technologies. One key need is a $100 million initiative to have multi-year tests of promising enteric methane inhibitors in at least 20 world locations, and related technical work to bring them to market.