UK needs to keep up momentum on cutting methane emissions at home and demonstrate international leadership urges Lords Committee

The Environment and Climate Change Committee’s report ‘Methane: keep up the momentum’ (published today) recommends the Government produces a methane action plan, setting out how it aims to meet its global commitment to reduce anthropogenic methane emissions, caused predominately by energy (oil and gas), agriculture and waste management.

Whilst acknowledging the reductions in methane emissions achieved to date in the UK, and the need to balance economic considerations of action and inaction, the committee is concerned that the progress in the UK has slowed, even as global methane concentrations continue to rise.

After hearing from fossil fuel and waste management experts, farmers, academics, scientists and Ministers, the report also calls on the government to:

• demand greater transparency and accountability in oil and gas of industry commitments to end the routine venting and flaring of methane;
  
  
• identify the most cost-effective traditional and cutting-edge technological options in agriculture to mitigate methane and support farmers to adopt them;
  
  
• ensure that the UK’s world-leading best practice in waste management is maintained and built upon;
  
  
• prioritise diplomatic actions that will have the greatest international impact, demonstrate international leadership, and align policy and regulatory tools with international best practice;
  
  
• review the regulatory framework across sectors to ensure a consistent approach that prioritises methane mitigation and enhanced data collection by sector.

Baroness Sheehan, Chair of the Environment and Climate Change Committee, said;

“In 2021 at the Glasgow COP, the UK helped launch the Global Methane Pledge, recognising methane’s potency as a greenhouse gas. Methane is eighty 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 Government’s advisory Climate Change Committee, stressed that rapidly reducing methane emissions alongside addressing carbon dioxide 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. 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.”

Download an embargoed copy of the report here.