But my recent field research on dairy farms suggests emissions from slurry, cattle dung mixed with water, could be four to five times greater than the official government estimates.

While most attention is focused on enteric emissions, largely the burps from the animals themselves, my new study with colleagues means that much more attention needs to be paid to how to reduce methane emissions from storing slurry.

Fortunately, new technologies can capture, process and use methane from slurry and turn it into a valuable resource – biomethane. Where there’s muck there’s money, the Victorians used to say, and this is no truer than in the reduction of livestock methane emissions to address the net zero challenge.

The UK government’s national inventory report on greenhouse gas emissions says that methane emissions from dairy cattle comprise 75 per cent enteric emissions and 25 per cent emissions from manure management – that’s the storage and spreading of livestock poo. These calculations are based on a methodology developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, involving a complex formula based on the number of animals, what they are fed, environmental conditions and so on.

Scientists seem comfortable with these existing enteric emissions calculations, but the formula for calculating emissions from manure management is now coming into question as field studies around the world find these emissions are often higher than assumed.

My colleagues and I monitored emissions from the slurry lagoons on two dairy farms in Cornwall for a year. The lagoons, which hold slurry in concrete-lined pits, were installed with airtight covers and the gas released from the slurry was collected and weighed.

On one farm, we found methane emissions were almost four times greater than that were reported by the UK government to the UN (145kg per cow per year, rather than 38kg).

On the second farm, methane emissions were more than five times greater (198kg per cow per year). If these figures are representative – and more research is needed to confirm this – then much more methane is coming from slurry storage than previously thought. The ratio of enteric to manure management could be closer to 50:50, and the total methane emissions from the dairy sector would be around 40% greater than the UK government officially reports.

There has been a lot of attention paid to addressing enteric emissions, but the slurry question has been treated as much less of a priority in comparison.

Approximately two-thirds of dairy cows across a total of 12,500 farms in the UK are on slurry systems.

Technological advances do offer solutions. The biogas industry is developing techniques to capture methane by covering slurry storage facilities. The methane gas is then cleaned and compressed and available as a fuel source.

Tractor manufacturers have developed tractors that run on methane, and businesses and local councils are exploring converting vehicle fleets to run on the gas. Methane captured from slurry storage can heat and power farm buildings.

Some of this technology is already up and running in Cornwall and beyond. Our estimates show that this energy saving could be worth tens of thousands of pounds to dairy farmers with an average-sized herd of milking cows. Biogas from slurry could be of huge value to the UK’s agriculture sector, too – potentially in the order of £400 to £500 million a year, according to our calculations.

So reducing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture can bring economic opportunities for farmers. The next challenge is to explore how these new supply chains for biomethane can be rapidly developed.

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“With partners like Ajinomoto Co., we are expanding our toolkit of solutions that we are bringing to our dairy farmers that have a dual effect – on the one hand reducing on farm GHG emissions whilst on the other, supporting farmers to improve their margin, and as a result, boost their resilience,” said Danone’s chief procurement officer Jean-Yves Krummenacher.

Ajinomoto is a Japanese multi-national company selling products ranging from frozen foods to animal nutrition. Danone, a French multi-national, sells a range of dairy and non-dairy foods such as Danone and Oikos yogurts, and International Delight coffee creamer.

The partnership between Ajinomoto and Danone to cut greenhouse gas emissions also comes after six of the world’s largest dairy companies – including Danone – last year unveiled an alliance to cut methane emissions at the United Nations COP28 summit.

Danone and Ajinomoto said they would join up to use an Ajinomoto product called AjiPro®-L.

This is used for a cow’s digestive system and figures cited by the companies said it decreases nitrous oxide emissions from manure by approximately 25 per cent and – if combined with a methane reduction additive – can amplify the effect of the methane reduction additive by approximately 30 per cent.

—Reporting for Reuters by Sudip Kar-Gupta. Additional reporting, editing by Geralyn Wichers.

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Those gains were partially offset by increasing emissions from diesel fuel, nitrogen fertilizer and land-use changes.

In a report released this week, the National Farmers Union (NFU) quantified agricultural emissions from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador.

The research compiles many data sources, including national inventory reports (NIRs), and Environment and Climate Change Canada data.

Without accounting for carbon sequestration or desequestration, the report estimates that emissions from agriculture fell to 1.5 million tonnes in 2021 from 1.8 million tonnes in 1990–a 17 per cent reduction.

The largest source of emissions continues to be cattle. Enteric methane from beef and dairy cattle, along with manure management, accounted for 0.52 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2021. This total has steadily decreased since 1990 as the cattle numbers declined. Efficiency gains have also decreased emissions, the report noted.

The NFU added that it’s difficult to draw a boundary line between emission that are and are not from livestock, as significant emissions come from production of feed grains.

Emissions from farm fuels decreased slightly to 0.21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2021 from 0.29 million tonnes in 1990. This includes diesel and gasoline use, fuel oil, natural gas, propane, and emissions from fossil-fuel-fired electricity generation.

Between 1990 and 2021, the composition of fuel use changed significantly. Fuel oil accounted for about three-quarters of farm fuel emissions in 1990. In 2021, they made up under a third of emissions. Meanwhile, emissions from diesel fuel went from about a quarter of fuel emissions to about two-thirds.

Emissions from nitrogen fertilizer, including fertilizer production, also increased by almost 60 per cent in from 1990 to 2021.

The report also examined carbon sequestration since 1990. This included changes in woody biomass (e.g. removal of trees, shelterbelts), land conversion to cropland, crop residue carbon input, and others.

It concluded that each year since 1990, Atlantic agricultural soils have experienced a net loss of soil carbon. Desequestration seems to be increasing, the NFU noted, with the most significant factor being conversion of land–mainly forest–to cropland. Smaller areas of perennial crops are also behind the change.

Meanwhile, manure application has been the most steady source of carbon addition to soils, the report said. As livestock numbers waned, so did sequestration from manure.

The NFU acknowledged that work needs to be done to reduce uncertainty in emissions numbers. However, it said there is enough data to move forward of agriculture emissions reduction.

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“There was always this notion that Prairie wetlands might be emitting a bunch of methane in the spring as they thaw,” said project lead Pascal Badiou, one of the scientists working for DUC’s research arm, the Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research.

Why it matters: The accuracy of emissions measurements can affect government funding for sustainable agriculture.

That old idea was in line with what scientists thought they knew about the relationship between greenhouse gases and wetlands. Wetlands contain bacteria that emit methane and, logically, those bacteria should become more active come spring, releasing a pulse of the gas.

There was limited western Canadian data to back the idea, however. Badiou said emissions in cold-weather temperate wetlands, which can remain frozen for five months of the year, had not been extensively studied. The existing body of work measured emissions from isolated patches of wetland roughly 20 centimetres in diameter.

“Those chambers serve as a very sterile, non-biological way to look at greenhouse gas fluxes, and there are lots of issues with that,” said Badiou.

For one thing, that methodology makes it a challenge to get a representative sample.

It takes a lot of work to collect enough samples to track changing greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the day, so samples would only be collected in the middle of the day, when emissions would be greatest.

More significantly, Badiou noted, samples can’t be obtained in early spring when the land is thawing — the very time when the methane surge was assumed to take place.

New methods and surprising results

DUC’s research took a different tack. The organization deployed high-tech flux towers in wetlands across Canada, the most recent of which was erected in July at central Manitoba’s Oak Hammock Marsh.

Two western Manitoba sites are also part of the network, with one installed near Newdale and another between Strathclair and Shoal Lake.

Each tower records changes in greenhouse gas concentrations (the fluxes) of the wetland where they are installed. Concentrations are measured at a rate of 20 to 40 times a second, according to Badiou.

The towers are then paired with an anemometer, a device that gives a three-dimensional reading of wind velocity and movement. The combined result is called a flux footprint.

“Instead of isolating just a small section of wetland to take these measurements, we’re actually getting flux measurements from the wetland as a whole, and that has helped us generate much better estimates of fluxes,” says Badiou.

As the data flowed in, scientists noticed something about that commonly held idea of a spring methane pulse: it never materialized.

“We have not seen any detectable spring pulse of methane,” said Badiou. “The amount of methane coming off these systems is lower than what we see in most published literature for these types of freshwater wetlands in temperate regions.”

National scope

The flux tower project is part of a larger national study co-led by Ducks Unlimited Canada and Irina Creed at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. The hope is to get better data on wetland greenhouse gas emissions across Canada’s different regional conditions.

“Part of our work has been to look at differences with respect to greenhouse gas emissions for wetlands embedded in perennial landscapes relative to wetlands that are embedded in conventional cropland,” said Badiou.

The emerging data has shown significant differences in water quality between those two types of wetlands, and that has significant implications for greenhouse gas emissions, the researcher noted.

“When you have wetlands embedded in perennial systems that are used in livestock operations, typically you have lower nutrients and higher sulphate levels,” said Badiou.

Sulphates inhibit methane production, as do lower nutrient levels.

“What it’s showing is that having intact landscapes around wetlands that are maintained through grazing systems is beneficial in terms of minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and likely increasing carbon sequestration,” said Badiou.

The national project is funded by the Beef Cattle Research Council, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Alliance, the Canadian Agriculture Partnership and Ducks Unlimited Canada and is being run in co-operation with the University of British Columbia and the Manitoba Forage & Grassland Association.

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First, let’s look at the greenhouse effect. It’s a topic that gets some people worked up, but this is because they confuse the greenhouse effect with global warming. While these topics are related, they are not the same thing.

So far in our classes, we have learned that the Earth absorbs shortwave energy coming from the sun. This energy is turned into heat and moved around by conduction, convection, advection and latent heat transfer.

If the Earth constantly absorbed short-wave radiation from the sun and did not give off any radiation of its own, our planet would get hotter each day. Since this isn’t the case, the Earth must be releasing this heat energy in some way, and it does this by emitting long-wave radiation.

The Earth absorbs short-wave radiation, heats up, and then cools off by emitting long-wave radiation back into space, so where does the greenhouse effect come into play?

Our atmosphere is quite transparent to short-wave radiation coming from the sun, much like the glass in a greenhouse. Most of the sun’s energy makes it through the atmosphere to reach the Earth’s surface, where it is converted to heat.

This heat is radiated back toward space in the form of long-wave radiation. In a greenhouse, the glass does not allow all of the long-wave radiation to pass through it. Instead, it traps the heat energy inside. The same thing happens in your car when it sits in direct sunshine.

Our atmosphere acts kind of like the glass in a greenhouse or car, although it is not exactly the same. Carbon dioxide, water vapour, methane, nitrous oxide and other gases absorb some of the outgoing long-wave radiation and re-emit it back toward the Earth’s surface. So, the heat is not trapped like it is in a greenhouse, but rather it is delayed in its passage to space, and this delay is what makes the Earth habitable.

Without this greenhouse effect, the average temperature on Earth would be a rather chilly -18 C, a far cry from the balmy 16 C it is now.

Now that we know the greenhouse effect is a good thing, and that without it we would not be able to survive, why do some people get worked up about global warming and the greenhouse effect?

The reason is that, like so many things, the wrong information or term is used and it becomes entrenched in the way things are reported. When scientists or the media talk about global warming and the greenhouse effect, what they should really be saying is the “enhanced” greenhouse effect.

The idea behind the enhanced greenhouse effect is that if we add more gasses to the atmosphere than would normally be there, and these gases absorb long-wave radiation and re-emit it back to Earth, then logically we should see an increase in the overall temperature of the Earth.

I don’t think anyone, whether for or against global warming, disagrees on this fact. Increasing the amount of greenhouse gases will allow for more long-wave radiation to be absorbed and retransmitted back to the Earth’s surface.

Why are there people who don’t think the Earth is undergoing warming due to this enhanced greenhouse effect? The answer is that it is not as simple as absorbing more long- wave radiation and re-emitting it back to Earth.

Simply absorbing more long-wave radiation doesn’t necessarily mean the Earth will warm up. This is due to all the different feedback mechanisms that come into play.

For example, as more long-wave energy is absorbed and then re-emitted, there is a good chance that more water will evaporate into the atmosphere, increasing the amount of vapour. More water vapour means more long-wave radiation will be absorbed and re-emitted, so we should get even warmer. But more water vapour can also mean more clouds, and more clouds result in more shortwave energy from the sun being reflected to space.

More clouds mean colder temperatures, at least under certain circumstances. What if the increase in cloud cover occurs more at night when the sun’s not shining? Then the clouds don’t block incoming shortwave radiation, but they do help to absorb outgoing long-wave radiation, so now it means even warmer temperatures.

As you can see, it is not a simple matter, and this is only one part to the global warming/enhanced greenhouse effect puzzle.

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“We need the research to get it done,” said David Rourke.

He brought the issue forward in a resolution at Keystone Agricultural Producers’ annual general meeting in Winnipeg Jan. 25-26.

The federal and provincial governments are pushing and paying farmers to use best management practices like 4R nutrient management and cover-cropping, the resolution said, but those practices won’t achieve the federal government’s 2050 net zero goal.

It asked KAP to lobby both levels of government to “invest more into researching logical, easy-to-use, scalable and cost-effective technologies that would assist farmers [to] be financially sustainable when striving towards the Canadian goal of clean growth and net zero by 2050.”

If the federal government wants lower fertilizer emissions, a significant amount of research is needed.

The promoted best management practices are “all good in their own way,” Rourke said. “4R is fine, except that you can’t get to net zero.”

Cover cropping involves seeding for a second time each year, one of them during harvest, he added.

The motion carried with little debate.

The resolution echoed comments from Mario Tenuta, senior industrial research chair in 4R Nutrient Management at the University of Manitoba.

[RELATED] Plant pulse crops for lower emissions

During a panel discussion, Tenuta told KAP members that BMPs promoted through current programs came from past research. Continued research and investment is needed for future programs and incentives, he said.

Who will pay?

Tenuta told farmers that nitrogen management will become more important and more scrutinized in food production. Technology for that management will improve to the point that it reduces N losses.

To farmers younger than 50 or 55 he said, “by the time you retire from farming, you’ll be farming for nitrogen management. It will be just as important as farming for yield and profitability.”

Farmers expressed concern that increased nitrogen scrutiny will come with costs they can’t recoup.

“If government and society want farmers to contribute towards reducing the impact of climate change by sequestering carbon, we’re providing a service to society so farmers should be paid for that service,” said Chuck Fossay, who farms near Starbuck and is president of the Manitoba Canola Growers Association and a former vice-president of KAP.

The On-Farm Climate Action Framework (OFCAF), which includes financial incentives for adopting BMPs, is “a good start,” Fossay added.

“Sustainability is the three-legged stool, and I am a strong believer in the economic part of that equation. I think it’s the biggest leg on the stool,” said out-going KAP president Bill Campbell.

He asked panelists how farmers can build a business model when applying practices that offer no yield increase or revenue (e.g. nitrification inhibitors) and where details of incentive programs are uncertain.

“Not all environmental practices pay for themselves,” answered John Heard, provincial soil specialist. “Which is too bad because most BMPs … there is a return to the farmer for doing the right thing.”

Heard said he thinks OFCAF is an “introductory offer” from the government that prompts people to try BMPs so they can become familiar with them and see where they fit best on the farm. He called it an interim measure before more pressure is brought to bear.

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Good news, right? There’s one issue: these laws, packages and amendments conspicuously avoid the “T” word.

Economists have long argued that the best option to cut emissions is a tax or, failing that, a type of carbon market known as “cap-and-trade”. But nowhere do the Australian or U.S. bills mention taxing carbon dioxide to discourage dumping it into the atmosphere.

Why? The answer is basically politics. The Gillard Labor government introduced a carbon tax that, although it worked, turned out to be political kryptonite. So, Labor’s climate policies now rely not on a tax, but on incentives for clean energy, carbon farming and electric transport.

This is not ideal. For decades, economists said carbon taxes and pollution allowance markets are the simplest and best way to reduce emissions at the lowest possible cost. But it seems taxes are out and stimulus is in.

This isn’t new, of course. For decades, politicians – particularly in Anglophone countries – have avoided carbon taxes or market-based ways of cutting planet-heating pollutants.

Every attempt to price carbon on a national level in the U.S. has failed. The first was in 1990. Presidential candidate turned climate campaigner Al Gore called for a carbon tax in his influential 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, but it was politically unappealing.

Why? Concerns over “federal overreach”, increasing cost of power, and of course, lobbying from fossil fuel industries.

Australia has the sad title of the first country in the world to introduce and remove a price on carbon, a sign of how fraught the idea has been. Labor’s Rudd-Gillard government lost the 2013 election with the “carbon tax” issue front-and-centre in the campaign.

Since Australia repealed its carbon tax, we’ve seen significant change in climate policies toward what is politically possible.

In the U.S., federal inaction on climate change spawned stronger environmental regulation by some states. Coalitions of American states now operate some of the world’s best pollution markets, such as that covering 12 eastern states and California’s own market.

The EU avoided taxes in favour of a cannier approach. They created a pollution market but allowed each state to determine how many allowances domestic firms could obtain. This made the policy more politically appetizing and the EU carbon market has since expanded substantially.

The world’s largest emitter, China, last year followed suit and launched the world’s largest carbon trading scheme.

But Australia didn’t follow the emissions trading model pursued by the EU and many U.S. states. Instead, the Abbott Coalition government brought in an emissions reduction fund to subsidize pollution reduction.

Companies can use pollution reduction to gain carbon credits, which can be sold to government or on the private market. The policy has proven thoroughly underwhelming.

So, tax and markets seem to be off the table when it comes to climate bills.

Last month, the U.S. passed a sweeping US$430 billion bill aimed at boosting health care funding and tackling climate change. It’s aimed at speeding up the shift to clean energy and electric transport, through rebates and tax credits for electric cars, efficient appliances and rooftop solar.

Conspicuously absent was any mention of a carbon tax or pollution allowance market.

Australia’s climate bill requires it to reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 but there’s very little information on the crucial question of how.

Labor’s bill envisages a type of market, regulating large polluters by allowing them to trade credits created by emissions reduction.

But both Australia and the U.S. have shied away from the principle of “polluter pays.”

This is disappointing. Yes, subsidizing pollution reduction can create incentives for behaviour change. But subsidies are often wasteful and inefficient. Taxes and markets are better options. We now know countries with a price on carbon have emissions growth rates around two per cent lower than those without. Longer term, this is often enough to see overall emissions begin to fall.

While the direct costs of subsidies are not immediately seen by citizens and companies, these subsidies have to be paid for through increases in general taxation. Carbon taxes, by contrast, are more explicit. A polluter will clearly notice having to pay the tax and be motivated to avoid it.

Instead of splashing out on subsidies, governments could still introduce a carbon tax to raise much-needed revenue while offering assistance to low-income households, cutting taxes elsewhere, or even reduce the deficit.

In Australia, there’s surprising support for a return of the carbon tax. But Labor may well be wary, given how their last carbon tax was easily defeated with a political scare campaign. One alternative could be to follow the EU and China and begin auctioning off pollution permits.

Australia could also borrow from America’s approach. Deep in the bill is a fee on methane emissions. This, some environmentalists believe, could be the crucial first step toward wider pricing of pollution.

Even though subsidies and rebates are politically popular, by themselves they cannot end greenhouse gas emissions. While carrots are popular, we will still need a stick – taxes or markets – to actually encourage polluters to cut emissions.

– Ian A. MacKenzie is associate professor in economics, University of Queensland.

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The government said protocols for four other sectors including agriculture and forest management are now being developed. It will also start developing protocols for carbon capture technology, which Canada’s high-polluting oil industry is betting on to slash its emissions, this summer.

For agriculture, the federal offset protocols now under development for future launch include “enhanced soil organic carbon” and “livestock feed management.”

As those and other protocols are completed, work on protocols including “livestock manure management” and “anaerobic digestion” will begin, the government said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has pledged to cut climate-warming emissions 40-45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Greenhouse gas emissions from waste, including landfills, make up seven per cent of Canada’s total carbon output.

The greenhouse gas offset credit system is intended to support a domestic carbon offset trading market, and the government said it will create new economic opportunities for companies and municipalities reducing emissions.

Participants can register projects and generate one tradeable offset credit for each tonne of emissions reduced or removed from the atmosphere, providing their projects follow the federal offset protocols that set out exactly which activities are eligible.

Credits can then be sold to others, such as heavy industrial emitters obliged to limit carbon pollution, or to companies wanting to voluntarily offset their emissions.

“Starting with landfills, we’re putting in place a market-based mechanism to incentivize businesses and municipalities to invest in the technologies and innovations that cut pollution,” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said in a statement.

Once adopted, the livestock feed management protocol will credit methane reductions from livestock, the government said, while the enhanced soil organic carbon protocol would allow eligible farmers to generate offset credits by adopting “sustainable agricultural land management activities.”

The exact ag practices that can be followed to generate offset credits are to be determined during the protocol development process, the government said. Public comment periods will take place for future draft protocols, and “technical expert teams” have been set up to advise on “the latest science.”

Farmers “have made significant gains in reducing the GHG emissions intensity of the sector in recent years,” Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said Wednesday in a statement. “We look forward to the development of specific details on how the agriculture sector can benefit under the federal offset credit system.”

The government expects the price of credits to broadly track Canada’s price on carbon — which is currently set at $50 a tonne and is scheduled to ramp up to $170 a tonne by 2030.

However, environmental groups warned allowing polluters to purchase offset credits instead of cutting their own emissions risked undermining climate goals.

“Offsetting doesn’t stop carbon from entering the atmosphere and warming our world, it just keeps it off the books of big polluters responsible,” said Greenpeace Canada spokesman Shane Moffatt.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nia Williams. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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The study has deployed sensor-equipped towers (flux towers) to measure carbon dioxide and methane emissions from wetlands on both cattle and annual crop farms.

The project is funded by the Canadian Agriculture Partnership, Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) and its project partner Manitoba Forage & Grassland Association (MFGA).

“Agriculture uses a significant amount of land in Western Canada and our study will help inform how different agricultural practices can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Pascal Badiou, lead project scientist from DUC’s Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research, said.

The study expects results next year. Among those findings, organizers say, the study will help include wetland management in national carbon and greenhouse gas reporting.

Other take-aways will include data to inform offset protocols for wetland restoration, which DUC and the MFGA hope will spark financial incentive for farmers, as well as groundwork for a long-term Prairie monitoring program.

“Accounting for the ecosystem services from these systems will be important for developing effective communications to increase public knowledge of the role the beef and forage industry play in maintaining natural landscapes and the services they provide society,” Lawrence Knockaert, MFGA chair, said.

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The Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) is the first time Canada has had a comprehensive plan, rather than just a collection of policies, setting out how it will meet its international commitment to cut carbon emissions 40-45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Environmental think tanks called it a “watershed moment” for Canadian climate policy, but warned Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government needed to follow through.

“A plan is just a plan without action. Expedited implementation will be key to success, and Canada now needs to shift into high gear,” said Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute.

Canada has missed every emissions reduction target it has ever set but Trudeau said fighting climate change was one of his government’s top priorities during last year’s election campaign, and a recent deal with the opposition New Democrats should ensure the passage of climate legislation for the next three years.

Key measures include a zero-emissions vehicle mandate that is more ambitious than anything proposed by Canada’s neighbour the United States, and a target for reducing emissions from the oil and gas sector alone 42 per cent below current levels by 2030.

For the ag sector, the ERP as released Tuesday calls for $470 million for the Agricultural Climate Solutions: On-Farm Climate Action Fund, to “top up funding for some current successful applicants, broaden support to additional key climate mitigation practices, extend the program past its current end date of 2023-24, and support adoption of practices” to cut fertilizer and methane emissions.

Another existing program, the Agricultural Clean Technology program, would see its funding tripled to $330 million, going toward “broadening and expanding” its scope.

The ERP also includes $150 million to fund a “resilient agricultural landscapes” program it said would back carbon sequestration, adaptation and “other environmental co-benefits.”

Another $100 million, meanwhile, is to fund “transformative science for a sustainable sector in an uncertain climate,” including “fundamental and applied” research, improved ag extension services to support new practices and technologies, and collecting to data to gauge the ag sector’s “environmental performance” over time.

‘Different expectations’

The ERP was introduced under the requirements of Canada’s Net-Zero Accountability Act, which the government adopted last summer in a bid to produce more binding climate policies.

The country is the world’s fourth largest oil producer and 10th largest carbon emitter. The oil and gas industry is its highest polluting industry, followed by transportation.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector have risen for the last two decades, meaning the 42 per cent cut from current levels will only amount to a 31 per cent cut from 2005 levels.

That lower target for the oil and gas sector means other parts of the economy will have to make deeper emissions cuts if Canada is to hit its overall 40-45 per cent reduction goal, said Simon Dyer, deputy executive director of the Pembina Institute.

“We believe the oil and gas sector has the ability to do more, and do its fair share,” Dyer said.

Trudeau said the emissions targets had to be realizable as well as ambitious and the electricity sector, for example, would be making much bigger cuts.

“Different sectors have different expectations… Canadians have had far too long of targets that have been set, but not achieved,” Trudeau told a news conference in Vancouver.

Tuesday’s plan also noted the government intends to release a separate plan this year to cut methane emissions “across the economy.” Methane, the government said, accounts for 13 per cent of Canada’s total 2019 greenhouse gas emissions, with over 90 per cent of methane emissions coming from the oil and gas, agriculture and waste management sectors combined.

Overall, the ERP sets an interim goal of cutting planet-warming carbon emissions 20 per cent below 2005 levels by 2026. While not an official target like the 2030 objective, the 2026 goal will be a major measure of whether Canada is on track.

The government is also introducing a mandate that 60 per cent of light-duty vehicles sold in 2030 must be zero-emissions, rising to 100 per cent by 2035.

Those targets put Canada “among the pack of leading jurisdictions” in terms of zero-emission vehicle mandates, said Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada.

In the U.S., the Biden administration so far has declined to set a firm deadline for phasing out sales of combustion vehicles. Instead, President Joe Biden has set a target for 50 per cent of new cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. to be electric by 2030.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nia Williams and Ismail Shakil. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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