Overcoming the Regulatory and Financial Barriers to Reducing Agricultural Methane Emissions

Panelists include representatives from: Global Methane Hub, Cargill, World Bank, GIZ and national governments.
According to the FAO Statistical Yearbook 2020, over 800 million people, or 27% of the world's labor force, find their livelihoods in agriculture. Agriculture is essential to human livelihoods and well-being; however, many agricultural operations are responsible for releasing substantial amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases include significant quantities of methane, which contributes to hazardous levels of tropospheric ozone and air pollution and is more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming our planet. 

Methane emissions from agriculture have often been viewed as more difficult to abate, both because of regulatory and financial challenges as well as a perceived risk to livelihood/food security. But that makes a focus on agriculture methane emissions all the more important, and many opportunities to reduce emissions have not been widely enough understood – both to scale existing solutions and to drive forward innovation and R&D. Now is the time to scale up efforts to reshape the agriculture sector to support farmers, improve the productivity of farms, build resilience, keeping jobs available, and reduce methane emissions across agriculture and food systems.

This event will highlight opportunities to deliver immediate climate and air quality benefits and actions on methane emissions from paddy rice and livestock enteric fermentation by looking at the way in which countries can overcome the regulatory and financial barriers to agriculture sector methane reductions.

We will first launch the Enteric Fermentation R&D Accelerator initiative—one of the innovation sprints by AIM for Climate. Following this, we would provide insight into Thai paddy rice methane reduction projects taking place in Asia and the tools used to overcome the challenges faced. We would then offer a private sector perspective on the opportunities to reducing methane emissions from beef sector in developed countries. After, we would allow experts from the World Bank to share some of the financial products and technical assistance available to countries to reduce methane in agriculture, and finally, we would allow two developing country focal points to offer insights into the lessons learned when overcoming their own challenges in the sector.

During these interventions, our main aim focuses on the win-win opportunities to reduce methane emissions intensity, explore additional best practices and incentives, and highlight areas for increased R&D, including the strong call for investment in the enteric R&D accelerator needed from government, private sector, and financial institutions.