OUR WORK
The Methane Science Accord is dedicated to promoting science-based policies and practices related to methane emissions. Our work focuses on advocating for a better understanding of methane's function in natural processes and role in climate change, particularly in relation to ruminant methane, which is methane produced by livestock. We believe that current scientific research indicates that ruminant methane's warming effect is significantly less than previously thought, and we are committed to challenging outdated methodologies, such as the GWP100 standard, and protecting nature and farming from experimental technologies.
Submissions
Read a selection of submissions from the team at the Methane Science Accord
Articles
Articles and Opinion pieces from the team at the Methane Science Accord
Interviews
Interviews with the team at the Methane Science Accord, (including podcasts)
Videos
Find short informative videos, breaking down the issues; (Podcast interviews are in the Press section)
Science & Data
The team from the Methane Science Accord break down the Science and report the Data
Issues
The team at the Methane Science Accord break down the issues, in depth
SEARCH
INTERVIEWS
with the Methane Accord Team
Dom George from Rural Exchange & Owen Jennings to unpack his keynote at the World Association of Sustainable Livestock Conference in Spain. They dive into why NZ is pouring over a billion dollars into methane mitigation research for a problem Owen argues barely exists—and how current methane accounting protocols inflate New Zealand’s warming impact by a staggering 300 to 400%.
Our farmers are ‘carbon neutral’ to use a typical brain-dead expression, often vaunted by what is now a massive international time and money-wasting clobbering machine. Warming measuring technologies in agriculture designed by technocrats who wouldn’t know a cow from a car, are hurting farming and sucking up state funds.
We are recklessly throwing taxpayer funds at a non-existent problem while Kiwis can’t afford a doctor’s visit and disabled wait for better care. Over a billion dollars have gone into this frivolous exercise.
Extract: I think we need to be very careful that what we're doing is practical, it's scalable, it's cheap, because we’ve had this weird fascination of intensive, expensive interference with our advantage which is actually a resource advantage for New Zealand as our low input pasture raised system. So we've got to be very careful we don't turn ourselves into an EU type of scenario. And I also think that all of these things also can be a bit of a excuse for intensifying agriculture, and that is not the way that we should be going in terms of GE. .. all of this technology that's disguised as something that we need, when actually we need to make sure that we are promoting everything that we do naturally ..
Platform: Sean Plunket talks to the former National President of Federated Farmers Owen Jennings about New Zealand's methane emission targets.
.. that New Zealand's ruminant emissions which come from our sheep and cattle have been steadily reducing factor way back to about 2005 but particularly since 2015. And what that means and this is not readily understood is that the pool of methane in the atmosphere coming from our stock is reducing in size.
Owen Jennings, respected New Zealand farmer, former MP, and long-standing agricultural leader, will represent New Zealand at the II Congreso Mundial de Ganadería Sostenible (II World Congress on Sustainable Livestock) to be held in Extremadura, Spain, from 12–15 November 2025.
“Power and food inflation, actually food inflation. If you're thinking you're paying enough the butter at the moment and it's very expensive, well fasten your seat belt, because once we add the true cost of Paris, and their technology, initiatives, additives, boluses, pills, potions, plus land use change; just to tick the Paris box, wait and see! … I was thinking about this morning on the farm. As a country, we seem to be terrified of the wrong things. We seem to be terrified of what highly subsidised, heavily populated industrial countries think of us more so than protecting and promoting our natural competitive advantage, which actually is using our resources, our water, our highly productive soils, our hill country to our advantage, our grass feed protein.
The Country:McDonald's, a wealthy global junk food company, saying that New Zealand farmers should actually be thanking them, because instead of paying as a premium for our naturally pasture raised, free range red meat, they're going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars “to fund projects to help New Zealand farmers with their on farm management”. Well, bugger me. I'm not sure that we need McDonald's to be telling us, how to improve our farm productivity!
We're spending far too much time listening to sermons from desk sitters & junk food companies, not enough promoting our unique, biodiverse productivity to the world.
Peter Foster of the Methane Science Accord joins Jaspreet Boparai and Don Nicolson to critique the Government's methane science review panel, accusing it of sidelining key experts and ignoring crucial data. Foster argues the panel was predisposed toward maintaining the status quo, dismissing international findings that question methane's climate impact. With claims that global warming potential metrics are flawed and New Zealand livestock emissions are near-negligible, they call out what they see as decades of scientific groupthink and political inaction. A passionate discussion that challenges the mainstream narrative and calls for an open, evidence-based debate.
Featured:
Methane, Climate Policy & Scientific Crediability
Peter Foster on RCR, with Jaspreet Boparai + Don Nicolson 18 June 2025 ::: Episode →
ARTICLES
by the Methane Accord Team
While the world races to engineer methane fixes. New Zealand’s most powerful climate solution is already here, under our boots, in our pastures, and woven through our native forests. It’s not a policy. It’s a process: soil microbes eating methane, day after day, year after year, in ecosystems carefully tended by farmers working with nature, not against it. Our secret isn’t high-tech. It’s low input natural farming. Across 9.5 million hectares of permanent pasture and 8 million of native forest, New Zealand’s ecosystems operate as a dynamic biological climate regulator
Despite the circular science, livestock like my heifers are condemned as climate culprits. There’s no chance to enter a plea, let alone ask for a trial by science. We are told we must do “our bit”. Yet our stable, sustainable livestock systems get no credit for the CO₂ absorbed to grow the grass in the first place. Basic high school science tells us that the only way ruminants produce greenhouse gases is by eating plants that use greenhouse gases to grow. You can’t have one without the other.
Farmers are being asked to celebrate a target that changes nothing for the climate, wastes taxpayer money, and ignores real science. Our farmers feed a growing global population with high-quality, natural, safe, emissions-efficient food. That ability is something to protect, not punish. New Zealand farming isn’t the climate problem, it’s part of the climate solution. Our grass-fed, pasture-based systems produce some of the lowest emissions per kilogram of food in the world. Undermining that system with unnecessary interventions erodes our competitive advantage and the trust that underpins New Zealand’s brand.
SCIENCE & DATA
One of the most critically important developments in livestock farming, is the growing realisation that ruminant methane emissions are not source of problematic climate change. Recent scientific findings coupled with a more principled appraisal of the established facts is resulting in strong demands to have ruminant eructation removed from all climate change taxing. This paper proposes building an international constituency under the World Association for Sustainable Livestock Farming to have ruminant methane emissions removed from the purview of Paris.
The survey is a collaborative effort between NZ Farming, Groundswell, and the Methane Science Accord. Shared with over 419,000 followers, the survey offered grassroots New Zealand farmers a chance to have their say on 10 questions focused on ruminant methane and the economic impact of the Paris Accord on both farming businesses and the broader economy.
A major new independent farmer survey reveals overwhelming rejection of New Zealand’s current ruminant methane strategy, exposing a deep disconnect between grassroots producers and industry leadership.
.. the projection of total NZ anthropogenic methane, going forward to 2100, would be 10 millionths of a degree per year. The margin of error for atmospheric temperature measurement is between 0.2 and 0.5°C, an average of 0.35°C. At 10 millionths °C/year it would then take 35,000 years for warming from NZ methane to become measurable or 87,500 years for warming from NZ livestock to be measurable. In order to reduce this figure our bureaucrats and politicians are prepared to destroy our agricultural industry that provides some 40% of NZ’s overseas earnings.
We now understand that anaerobic (without oxygen) decomposition of organic matter produces a mixture of methane, phosphine and diphosphane. The latter ignite spontaneously on contact with air also igniting the methane giving rise to the ghostly lights often seen over swamps. Methane then is a natural gas produced wherever decomposition of organic matter occurs. Decomposition requires water and warmth ..
Methane has been in our atmosphere since the dawn of Earth time.
Methane was considered to be one of the prebiotic gases of the atmosphere along with ammonia, nitrogen, hydrogen, CO2 and water. It would have been involved with early metabolism in anaerobic microbes from the beginning of life on this planet, some 3.5 billion years ago.
… It appears to assume that the methane emissions from dairy and meat count, but they do not because they come from carbon dioxide that was already in the atmosphere and was taken up by grass in photosynthesis. Any methane decays on a decade timescale back to carbon dioxide. It is circular. Methane is so short-lived it equilibrates and no extra warming results .. We do need to decrease emissions, but fossil fuels.
We are warmed by the sun. Its energy enters our atmosphere and much of it bounces back upward into space. The greenhouses gases of water vapour, plus trace gases, CO2, methane nitrous oxide and ozone interact with the outgoing energy. Their molecules vibrate, absorb the outgoing energy and then lose it in collisions with other gases, and re-emitting it in all directions. It is the countless billions of interactions every second that keeps our planet warm ...
Summary: Ruminant methane is a minor gas too trivial and insignificant to be taxed. When Wikipedia says all methane is only 0.00018%¹ of the atmosphere it is difficult to grasp the triviality of that statistic.
A big chunk of the planet’s methane is natural with ruminant methane (emissions from sheep, cattle, gazelles, buffalo) making up just 14%
If the whole atmosphere around the earth was a plane flight from Auckland to Los Angeles then all methane from all sources would represent just: 18.89 metres - 10,496 X 0.00018%
However ruminant methane is only 14% of all methane so it is represented by: 2.644 metres - 14% of 18.89 metres
In my submission on Gene Tech Bill; I noted that New Zealand farmers are one if not the only farmers in the developed world that do not receive government subsidies, as such they are highly sensitive to market demand. That GMO GE farming in the United States in particular is heavily government subsidised. GMO GE is a lower value product, on average reducing crop value by 15-20% to non-GMO crops and 115%+ less than organic crops…NZ’s proposed Gene Technology Bill sets out no liability framework, no obligations to protect indigenous biodiversity, productive and speciality seeds, nor animal welfare. The bill appears to carve out liability- free framework for gene technologies. There appears no requirement to evaluate long tail risk, no obligations for disclosure and law appears to have been developed with only laboratory processes in mind.
Silver Fern Farms’ decision to kowtow to global emissions agendas is unnecessary and deeply insulting to NZ farmers, the world’s most efficient producers of natural, pasture-fed, low-input food. Instead of championing this which is what consumers actually want, SFF is bowing to corporate-driven demands that misrepresent market realities. UK consumers’ clear rejection of feed additive Bovaer proves there’s no demand for these unnecessary “innovations.” By pandering to these disconnected corporates, SFF are undermining the very advantages that set our farming apart globally.
From previous comments there appears to be a fanciful belief that some significant reduction can be made to livestock methane by the use of a technology such as boluses, vaccines, genetics etc. The public reaction overseas to bovaer coupled with the cost and effort to farmers should tell you that that is not a solution.
You will no doubt be hearing from many scientists telling you they are on the brink of a solution, just a few more millions in research needed. Unfortunately they have been doing that for decades and but their claims never eventuate- only the demand for more funding.
Submission to Methane Review Panel for the METHANE SCIENCE ACCORD and GROUNDSWELL, prepared by Peter Foster. The Methane Science Accord and its partners wish to acknowledge the debt that farmers have to the work of the late Dr Jock Allison…
No one has been able to actually translate ruminant methane emissions into warming effect, at least not to a quantum that is measurable or in anything other than a model…
We know full well, and it is not disputed, that grass fed ruminants, as we have in NZ, are only cycling C02 and methane, it is the carbon cycle, it is neutral …
Emerging new biotechnologies (NBTs) or GE technologies are potentially fraught with unintended and off-target effects showing deleterious mutations. Is temperature reductions of millionths of a degree worth the risk?
Methane mitigation Biotechnology tools: Has a risk to benefit analysis been done for these ‘never before used biotechnology tools’? What price do you put on an entire industry that stands to lose everything if these novel biotechnology tools are released and then subsequently found to be unsafe and or unwanted? Are biotech companies held liable if safety concerns arise further down the track? Or will NZ farmers have to pick up the bill for that too?
We suggest that methane emission reduction targets of 24 to 47% were set not because methane emissions need to reduce in order to “stop” global warming (as methane is having a barely measurable impact on global warming, if any) but to actually offset generic CO2 emissions.
… Destruction of Rural Communities Regulatory impacts show that economic growth could slow by $5-12 billion per year between 2020 to 2050 – a loss of around $300 billion. Farming outputs have been modelled to drop by 50 percent from current levels by 2050 – which is both ironic and unpalatable, given that this is the same timeframe that the primary sector was asked to double it's productive capability.
The opening paragraph of your section on agriculture says it is responsible for 51% of this country’s emissions. We then see constant reference to emissions in the sector. But these emissions bear absolutely no relationship to warming. It is now acknowledged that methane is a short-lived gas and does not need to reduce to zero to be warming neutral. But where has it ever been quantified how much warming our livestock cause? How can anyone make a realistic target for methane without this information? Instead, we get targets based on the outdated emissions calculated using the flawed GWP 100 metric. I have known since a 2011 meeting on greenhouse gas metrics I attended, that was presented by IPCC authors, that this metric does not accurately calculate methane’s warming. The IPCC now acknowledges that in the case of stable livestock production, as is the case in New Zealand, it overstates warming by three or four times. So why is the Commission using such outdated metrics?
This is a political issue not a scientific one and has become contentious because of those that either derive income directly or are trying to derive income based on GHG emissions being an issue and are subsequently creating an industry around this. Quite simply if the effect of Methane is shown scientifically to be negated then the logical and honest course is to acknowledge this, move on and search for an actual problem where research and action can achieve a result. Methane is not the actual problem.
The coalition government has a mandate to take the hidden costs out of the productive sector. In this instance it starts with acknowledging the IPCC statement that settings for methane were overstated 3-4 times and the emissions in NZ are not 48%, (or 70% as uttered by Ministry for the Environment only yesterday), but likely of no consequence. An additional requirement is to quantify the warming affect of the methane produced or its longevity in the atmosphere but if the starting point is inaccurate then what will the answer be? …
The subject of Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change is an extensive topic and I could happily present and expand on many related topics. I have, however, chosen to limit my submission to just three parts:
Ruminant Methane Emissions: A More Complete View
Methane’s contribution to Greenhouse Warming
Suggested guidelines for reviewing greenhouse gas targets