AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - An alternative greenhouse gas accounting metric being aggressively backed by agribusiness lobbyists would allow major meat and dairy exporting nations to conceal their livestock sector's impact on global warming by massively overstating methane emissions reductions, new research commissioned by Greenpeace International has revealed.
Sophie Nodzenski, Campaigner at Greenpeace International, said: "Rapid methane cuts give us our best shot at keeping global heating overshoot to a minimum while we decarbonise the global economy. Yet, while temperature overshoot takes center stage at COP31, the industrial livestock lobby is pushing a dangerous accounting trick to shirk its fair share. Changing the metrics to hide real emissions isn't climate action – it's shifting the bill for massive pollution onto those least responsible for it."
The report investigates GWP*, a controversial metric that tracks whether methane emissions are going up or down rather than counting total emission changes. It assumes that steady methane emissions cause no extra warming because methane breaks down quickly – even though it traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in the short term and is responsible for approximately 0.5°C of global heating.
According to modeling by the think-tank Cerulogy, GWP* allows countries to present negligible cuts in emissions as significant climate victories. A cut of a mere 0.6% in actual methane emissions by the world's ten largest meat and dairy exporters between 2020 and 2030, could be reported as a 30% reduction under the GWP* metric.
A 30% reduction of actual emissions would allow these countries, if adopting the GWP* metric, to claim their emissions are actually cooling the planet – logging 898 million tonnes of "negative emissions" without making any real change. Under the standard metric, 2030 would still see 640 million tonnes of methane released by livestock into the atmosphere, continuing to massively drive climate heating.[1]
This bookkeeping trick wipes away real-world climate-heating gases, creating a massive 1,538 million tonne gap between reported figures under GWP* and atmospheric reality in a single year. The investigation highlights the extreme scale of these artificial 'paper' reductions. 1,538 million tonne of carbon is:
- More than Indonesia's total national greenhouse gas emissions in 2024.
- 86% of total global aviation emissions recorded in 2023.
- About 6.4 times the annual greenhouse gas footprint of JBS, the world's largest meat producer, in 2023.
- Equivalent to three times the passenger cars driving across Europe's streets each year (780 million vehicles).
If some countries unilaterally decide to report their methane emissions using GWP* within the framework of a global climate agreement that was built with absolute reductions in mind, this would effectively wipe massive emissions off the global emissions balance sheet, surreptitiously eating up our remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5°C. Over the 2020-2030 period, systemic GWP* reporting from these 10 countries would create a cumulative gap of obscured emissions equal to nearly a fifth of the world's current total annual global greenhouse gas emissions.
The report also highlights a risk of governments using these paper savings in agriculture to justify slower decarbonisation in heavy-polluting fossil fuel sectors. Australia, for example, could use GWP* to report 76 million tonnes of negative emissions to justify continued pollution in its dirty coal sector equivalent to 20 coal-fired power stations running for a year. Meanwhile, the United States could hide emissions equivalent to 86 million passenger cars.
Greenpeace International warns that GWP* is a threat to global climate goals and is urging governments to reject GWP* for national target setting and reporting, establish binding agricultural emissions reduction targets aligned with 1.5°C, and support a just transition toward ecological farming.
