Methane and Metrics: From global climate policy to the NZ farm

New Zealand in general and our farmers in particular have a strong interest in how global agriculture is included in any international agreement on climate change. In NZ, 48% of greenhouse gas emissions are from agriculture: methane (30%) and nitrous oxide (18%). This is a very high proportion compared with the rest of the developed world.

Recent modelling has shown that an effective global climate policy for agriculture would help NZ economically, as effective global mitigation for agriculture will lower the global costs of limiting warming to 2 degrees. It will also raise commodity prices for dairy and meat, which provides benefits for our farmers. In this paper we extend this modelling to evaluate the impact of global climate policy scenarios on NZ farmers.