- Agriculture needs more scalable innovations to deliver meaningful methane cuts.
- Weak market signals and limited incentives are stalling adoption.
- A US$100 million accelerator will target solutions to halve methane emissions by 2040.
Efforts to reduce methane emissions are being held back by a lack of scalable solutions, with existing interventions falling short of what is needed to achieve meaningful cuts while maintaining food production, according to Hayden Montgomery, agriculture programme director at the Global Methane Hub.
“There’s definitely a lack of solutions,” Montgomery told AgNavigator.
“I know a lot of the time there’s a lot of positivity towards ‘we have the solutions; we just need to adopt them’. I don’t subscribe to that. If you look at the evidence behind them and the applicability of the different systems, it just doesn’t get us where we need to get to. There’s no question – we need more solutions.”
Promising research is not enough
In rice systems, the limitations of existing methane-cutting solutions are perhaps best exemplified by alternate wetting and drying (AWD).
Despite being studied and promoted for more than three decades, the water management practice has not solved the sector’s emissions problem.
“We know AWD works. Everybody agrees that if you drain the field more, you’re going to have less methane,” said Woo Wei Li, senior programme officer for agriculture.
“But getting farmers to implement that protocol is difficult because of logistical and physical environment challenges. You have non-level fields, irrigation issues and all these practical constraints. When it rains, you can’t drain the field. Those are the very practical, real-world challenges. That’s the problem with AWD.”
Furthermore, while studies have shown that interventions such as biochar can reduce methane emissions in rice systems, the evidence remains too fragmented and small-scale to support nationwide deployment strategies, said Woo.
“The studies aren’t done at a large enough scale to show that if you apply the practice in one region and another region, you’ll get the same outcome. There are a lot of promising studies, but they don’t knit together in a coherent enough way.”
The missing market
Montgomery stressed that a central barrier to cutting methane emissions, especially from rice and livestock systems, is that methane has no market value or price.
“Why would a farmer apply a certain compound to the soil because it reduces methane? Why would they give an animal a feed additive to reduce methane? What is the direct benefit to the farmer? There’s no productivity gain. It costs money.”
Without a real value or price, farmers have no reason to act, said Montgomery. This push can come from governments, the private sector and consumers.
“Consumers will have to say they want this on the shelves when we go to the supermarket… But the market is not there. Until it is, there’s always going to be a challenge to get these things adopted.”
He added that if consumers are not asking for it, the private sector or government has to act on their behalf to set a cost or an incentive.
“Adoption by farmers is always going to be constrained unless we have those signals. And the reality is those signals are muted or non-existent. Where they exist, they are narrow, around the carbon market and a certain project in a certain place, which is kind of a pilot scale. But at scale, we’re still lacking those strong signals and policy.”
Work must begin on multiple fronts
These comments come as the Global Methane Hub launches a new strategy for halving methane emissions from rice farming by 2040.
The strategy outlines five research areas to be prioritised by the Global Methane Hub’s $100 million Rice Methane Innovation Accelerator, which was launched last year.
As part of the strategy, the accelerator will advance research into agronomic practices, soil amendments, plant genetics, methane-reducing agents and measurement tools.
“No single practice will get us to 50% reductions, so this strategy is about developing and validating more solutions from across agronomy, plant genetics and other areas of the strategy, and demonstrating how these are best stacked to make them practical and affordable so that farmers can adopt them and cut emissions, without affecting harvests,” said Montgomery.
He explained that the Global Methane Hub does not intend to pursue a single priority over all others. Instead, the organisation plans to launch activities across the full spectrum of research needs.
Some initiatives can move quickly because they build on existing knowledge. Site-specific crop nutrition guidance is one example, as much of the underlying information already exists.
“First and foremost, we want to make sure it’s done in a way that has scientific rigour. We can’t be playing with farmers’ livelihoods and proposing solutions that aren’t real,” said Montgomery.
The rice strategy follows a model previously developed by the Global Methane Hub for livestock methane reduction through its Enteric Fermentation Accelerator programme, which has raised over $200 million, of which over $120 million has been deployed in research projects to date.
It sees the livestock effort as proof that a coordinated global strategy can help align public, private and philanthropic investment around shared objectives.
