A controversial way of measuring how much methane warms the planet has stirred debate in recent years – particularly around assessing the climate impact of livestock farming.
The metric – known as GWP* (global warming potential star) – was designed to more precisely account for the warming impact of short-lived greenhouse gases, such as methane.
No country so far has used GWP* to measure emissions, but New Zealand is currently considering its use.
In June, a group of climate scientists from around the world wrote an open letter advising against this.
They argued that the metric “creates the expectation that current high levels of methane emissions are allowed to continue”.
Climate experts tell Carbon Brief that there is “no strong debate” on the science behind GWP* and that it can accurately assess the global warming effect of methane.
But many experts also firmly caution against its use in national climate targets, believing it could allow countries to prolong high levels of emissions at a time when they should be drastically cut.
Some researchers tell Carbon Brief that GWP* is an “accounting trick” and a “get-out-of-jail-free card for methane emitters”. A 2021 Bloomberg article called the metric “fuzzy methane math”.
Prof Myles Allen, one of the scientists who created GWP*, tells Carbon Brief that the metric is “nothing more” than one way of better understanding the climate impact of different actions as part of efforts to limit warming under the Paris Agreement.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explains the science behind GWP*, why the metric is so divisive and the ways in which its use has been considered.
- What is GWP*?
- What are the main controversies around using GWP*?
- Do any countries currently use GWP* to measure methane emissions?
- What do experts think about the use of GWP*?
What is GWP*?
Global warming is caused by a build up of greenhouse gases – mainly from burning fossil fuels – trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Different gases cause differing levels of warming and remain in the atmosphere for varying lengths of time. For example, carbon dioxide (CO2), the main contributor to warming, lingers for centuries, whereas other gases last decades or even millennia.
To account for these variables, scientists use a metric known as global warming potential (GWP), which assesses the warming caused by different gases compared to CO2, which has a GWP of 1.
Using GWP, emissions of other gases are calculated in terms of their “CO2 equivalent” over a given amount of time.
In their reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set out three GWP variants measured over 20 years (GWP20), 100 years (GWP100) and 500 years (GWP500).
GWP100 is the most common approach and is used to calculate emissions under the Paris Agreement.
Methane is a short-lived gas that only remains in the atmosphere for around 12 years before breaking down. But it causes a large burst of initial warming that is around 80 times more powerful than CO2, according to the IPCC.
This means that one tonne of methane causes the same amount of warming as around 80 tonnes of CO2, when measured over a period of 20 years.
When calculated over 100 years, methane’s shorter lifetime means it causes around 30 times more warming than CO2.
Some experts have criticised the use of GWP100, saying it does not sufficiently account for the fact that methane leaves the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2 and does not actually last for 100 years. This is the issue that GWP* was designed to fix.
GWP* calculates the warming contributions of long- and short-lived gases at different rates, accounting for their varying lifetimes in the atmosphere.
One of the researchers behind GWP*, Dr Michelle Cain, explained in a 2018 Carbon Brief guest post that a constant rate of methane emissions can maintain stable atmospheric concentrations of the gas, assuming methane sinks remain constant as well.
In contrast, a constant rate of CO2 emissions “leads to year-on-year increases in warming, because the CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere”, Cain wrote. CO2 does not leave the atmosphere after a decade or so, as methane does, and continues to build over time until emissions stop.
Cain, formerly a researcher at the University of Oxford and now a senior lecturer at Cranfield University, added:
“For countries with high methane emissions – due to, say, agriculture – this can make a huge difference to how their progress in emission reductions is judged.”
Methane emissions that slowly decline or remain stable over time are calculated as contributing “no additional warming” to the planet, which is not the case with other GWP calculations.
The chart below shows simplified emissions scenarios for CO2 and methane, highlighting the different impacts they have on global warming over time.
The chart below shows how using the two different metrics – GWP* and GWP100 – affects the same emissions pathway throughout the 21st century, given the different warming impacts of greenhouse gases.
If, for example, a country emitted 4m tonnes of methane annually from 1990-2005, these emissions would now be considered “climate-neutral” using GWP*, as they are not actively contributing new warming to the atmosphere, but rather maintaining the existing levels of methane in the atmosphere in 1990.
This would not be the case under GWP100, which looks at the warming potential of emissions over the course of a century and does not account for their different atmospheric lifetimes.
GWP* can be used for other short-lived gases, such as some hydrofluorocarbons, but methane is the most significant short-lived gas when it comes to climate change.
The IPCC notes that converting methane emissions into CO2 equivalent using GWP100 “overstates the effect of constant methane emissions on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4” and understates the impact of new methane emissions “by a factor of 4-5 over the 20 years following the introduction of the new source”.
GWP* was created by several researchers, including Prof Myles Allen, the head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics at the University of Oxford. The concept was detailed in a 2016 study and first named in a 2018 study. It was further updated by the authors in 2019 and 2020.
Allen tells Carbon Brief that the researchers involved were “reluctant” to give their new metric a name, as it “was just a way of using reported numbers to calculate warming impact”. He adds:
“I think it’s really unfortunate that people have latched onto GWP*. It doesn’t matter. We could forget about GWP* entirely, we can just use a climate model to work out the warming impact…GWP* is a handy way of calculating the warming impact of activities. Nothing more.”
What are the main controversies around using GWP*?
Efforts to cut methane emissions are widely viewed as a “quick-win” to help limit the effects of climate change in the short term.
More than 100 countries signed a pledge, launched at COP26 in 2021, to cut global methane emissions by 30% by 2030.
Cutting methane would also help to counteract an acceleration in warming due to declining aerosol emissions, which are currently masking around half a degree of warming.
Experts Carbon Brief spoke to agree on the importance of cutting methane emissions, but disagree on whether GWP* helps or hinders these efforts.
The debate around the metric centres on the possible impacts of its use, rather than the soundness of the science behind it.
Prof Joeri Rogelj, a climate science and policy professor at Imperial College London, explains:
“At the global level, at any level, the method of GWP* actually provides a good, new way to translate the trajectory of methane emissions into equivalent emissions of CO2, or emissions of CO2 that would have an equivalent warming effect…The debate is on the application.”
Allen says he is a “little frustrated” that discussions around the use of GWP* have “become so emotive”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“Every action we take has both a temporary impact on global temperature and a permanent one. How much is in both areas depends on the action. We need to know those two things in order to make decisions about choices of action in pursuit of a temperature goal…GWP* gives you a handy way of doing that.”
Below, Carbon Brief details some of the main discussion points and controversies around GWP*.
Carbon cycle
A misleading claim frequently made about livestock is that cows do not contribute much to global warming because the methane they emit eventually returns to the land through the carbon cycle – the set of processes in which carbon is exchanged between the atmosphere, land and ocean, as well as the organisms they contain.
Those in favour of using GWP* to measure methane emissions often also stress the difference between methane emissions that come from animals – known as biogenic methane – and methane from fossil fuels.
Rogelj tells Carbon Brief that biogenic and fossil-sourced methane are “slightly different, but that difference is really second-order” when it comes to climate change.
Methane warms the planet while it is in the atmosphere, so the “climate effect is exactly the same, irrespective of which source the methane comes from”, Rogelj adds.
The differences become more significant when methane breaks down in the atmosphere and oxidises into water vapour and CO2.
CO2 that originated from a cow can be reabsorbed by plants and the land. But the CO2 resulting from fossil methane – which stems from sources such as flaring from oil and gas drilling – stays in the atmosphere. Although fossil methane has a “bit of a longer effect”, Rogelj says:
“This is a bit of a red herring, because the main effect is, of course, the effect that the methane has while it is methane and not what the carbon molecule of that methane has after [the] methane has been broken down or oxidised to CO2.”
He adds that there are ways of reducing agricultural methane, such as “diet change” or “management measures”, but no way to remove the emissions “100%”.
The graphic below shows the digestive process through which a cow emits methane.
Agriculture also causes other significant environmental harms. It is responsible for around 80% of global deforestation and is a key driver of biodiversity loss and water pollution.
Prof Frank Mitloehner, a professor and air-quality specialist at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), is one of the main proponents of GWP*, frequently speaking about it in public presentations and discussions with the farming sector.
He tells Carbon Brief that, while animal agriculture can cause environmental harm, it is a “silly argument” to say these impacts are being ignored in carbon-cycle discussions.
He gives an example of discussions on deaths from car accidents excluding mentions of the emissions from cars, saying that these wider impacts are still important and can be discussed separately.
He adds that it is an “urban myth” that biogenic methane emissions are not a concern because of the carbon cycle.
‘No additional warming’
Under GWP*, methane emissions stop causing new warming once they reduce by 10% over the course of 30 years – around 3% each decade, or 0.3% each year.
These emissions are then described in research and policy as causing “no additional warming”.
For example, a 2021 study from Mitloehner and other UC Davis researchers, found that methane emissions from the US cattle industry “have not contributed additional warming since 1986”, based on GWP* calculations. It also said that the dairy industry in California “will approach climate neutrality” by the 2030s, if methane emissions are cut by just 1% annually.
(According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, methane emissions from enteric fermentation – the digestive process through which cows produce the greenhouse gas – increased by more than 5% over 1990-2022.)
However, many critics take issue with the “no additional warming” concept.
The main criticism is that, although a gradually reducing herd of cattle may stabilise methane emissions, it still emits the polluting gas. If animal numbers were instead drastically reduced, this would cut methane emissions and lower warming rather than maintaining current levels.
Dr Caspar Donnison, a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, says the term no additional warming is “absolutely misleading” in the context of GWP*. He tells Carbon Brief:
“You just assume, on the face of it, that this means it has a neutral impact on the climate…But ‘no additional warming’ means that you’re still sustaining the warming that the herd is causing.”
Allen says that the debate focuses on the “stock of warming versus additional warming”. He compares it to accounting for historical emissions of CO2:
“If a country got rich by burning CO2, they’ve caused a lot of warming in the past. If they reduce their CO2 emissions to zero, then people are generally happy to call what they’re doing climate-neutral, even though they may be sitting on a huge heap of historical warming caused by their CO2 emissions while they were burning [fossil fuels].
“And yet, temperature-wise, that’s exactly the same thing as having a source of methane that’s declining by 3% per decade.”
Climate ambition
Another criticism around the use of GWP* is that countries or companies with high agricultural methane emissions could use the metric to make small emission reductions appear larger.
Dr Donal Murphy-Bokern, an independent agricultural and environmental scientist, believes that the metric can be used as a “get-out-of-jail-free card for methane emitters”. He adds:
“It’s all about saying carry on as we are; we’ll manage this by slightly reducing our emissions over a critical period in history, so as to appear at that critical period in history to be so-called ‘climate-neutral’.”
Mitloehner disagrees with this, noting that, while reductions in methane emissions appear significant under GWP*, increases also appear significant. He says:
“It is simply not true that GWP* is a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s not. If you reduce emissions, it makes your contributions look less. If you increase emissions, it makes your contributions much worse.”
Rogelj says he has not seen GWP* being used to advocate for the “highest possible ambition” in cutting methane emissions.
However, Allen says that “no metric tells you what to do”. He adds:
“How you measure emissions and how you measure warming has absolutely no bearing on whether you think a country has an obligation to undo some of the damage to the climate they’ve caused in the past.
“This is where the ‘free-pass’ argument makes no sense to me, because the existence of a method to calculate the warming impact of your emissions allows you to make decisions about emissions in light of their warming impact, sure, but it doesn’t tell you what the outcomes of those decisions should be.”
Allen adds that the livestock sector is “unsustainable globally”, with animal numbers and methane levels still rising.
The chart below shows how atmospheric methane concentrations have increased in recent decades.
Allen tells Carbon Brief:
“Do we need to eliminate livestock agriculture to stop global warming? No…[but] we do need to start decreasing it. And if we can decrease it faster than 3% per decade then that would help reduce warming that’s caused by other sectors or, indeed, undo some of the warming that the livestock sector has caused in the past.”
Mitloehner says considerations on the fairness of using GWP* are “real from a policy standpoint and they have to be addressed from a policy standpoint”. He adds:
“But, from a scientific standpoint – and that’s where I’m coming from – I think it’s not controversial.”
Baseline and historical emissions
The baseline year from which emissions reduction targets are set is significant, as it helps form the scope of climate ambition.
For example, high-emitting countries, such as the UK, have set 1990 as their baseline year for emissions-cutting targets, whereas many low-emitting countries may choose further back or more recent years, depending on their needs. Rogelj says:
“Because GWP* translates a change in emissions into either an instantaneous emission or instantaneous removal of CO2, your starting point becomes really important.
“If you start with very high emissions of methane and you did not in any way account for this high starting point, then even very minor, unambitious reductions in methane would result in creating credits for high-polluting countries.”
However, he notes that this is just one way of applying the metric and that there could be ways to avoid this “inequitable outcome”, such as applying GWP* globally and allocating each country a per-capita methane budget, instead of assessing based on national current or past emissions. (Rogelj and Prof Carl-Friedrich Schleussner discussed other possible GWP* equity measures in a 2019 study.)
The chart below, adapted from that study, shows how GWP* can significantly change the per-capita methane emissions of different countries. Some countries with high agricultural methane emissions, such as New Zealand, change from high to low per-capita emitters.
A 2025 study used a climate model to quantify future national warming contributions for Ireland under different emissions scenarios and found that “no additional warming” approaches, such as GWP*, are “not a robust basis for fair and effective national climate policy”.
Discussing baseline concerns, Allen says these considerations are the same for any other metric:
“It depends on how much account you want to take of [the] warming you’ve caused in the past – and at what point you want to take responsibility for the warming your actions had caused.”
He believes that most climate experts agree that it is good to understand the impact emissions have on global temperatures, but “where the controversy arises is about what you consider someone’s nominal emissions to be today”. He adds:
“This is where everybody gets upset, because if you use GWP*, then a livestock sector that’s reducing its emissions by 3% per decade – which most global-north livestock sectors are doing – it looks like their emissions are quite small.
“But that’s only a problem if you think that the main issue is working out whose fault global warming is, rather than working out what we should do about it.”
Communication
Many experts Carbon Brief spoke to took issue with how GWP* has been discussed by some of its proponents.
Murphy-Bokern criticises how Mitloehner and other experts communicate the metric. He says:
“The confusion arises from the activities of Mitloehner, in particular, where he presents the farming community – and the industry in general – with the idea that you can magic away the warming effect of methane simply by looking at the rate of change of methane emissions.”
Mitloehner says he has no regrets about his communication of GWP*, adding that he has “always emphasised to the livestock sector that reductions of methane are important”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“I’m proud because I have been able to take the livestock sector along with the understanding that reductions are needed and that they can be part of a solution if they understand that.”
The New York Times reported in 2022 that the research centre led by Mitloehner at the University of California, Davis “receives almost all its funding from industry donations and coordinates with a major livestock lobby group on messaging campaigns”. Other reports note his discussions about GWP* with stakeholders in various countries.
In response to these reports, Mitloehner says he believes it is important to work with the sector you are researching, adding that he receives both public and private funding. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The problem is not that they [the meat industry] are investing in research and communications and extension. The problem is that they are not putting in enough, because the public sector is withdrawing from this.
“Climate research is being slashed…If the government is not paying into research to quantify and reduce emissions – and those people who are critical of what we do say ‘oh, industry shouldn’t do it’ – then, I ask you, who should?”
Colin Woodall, the chief executive of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a US lobby group, said in 2022 that GWP* is the “methodology we need to make sure everybody is utilising in order to tell the true story of methane”, Unearthed reported. According to the outlet, he added:
“We’re working with our partners around the globe to ensure that everybody is working towards adoption of GWP*.”
Asked if he regrets anything about his communication of GWP*, Allen tells Carbon Brief:
“When we first introduced this – and, perhaps, this is one thing I do regret – I was, perhaps, a little naive in that I thought everybody would seize on focusing on [the] warming impact because it was, from a policy perspective, potentially much easier for the agricultural sector.
“I thought that this would actually be welcomed. But, sadly, it’s not been. And I think part of that is because of this narrative of blame.”
Do any countries currently use GWP* to measure methane emissions?
GWP* is not yet used by any country in methane emission reporting or targets. But it has been considered by New Zealand, Ireland and other nations with high agricultural emissions.
A 2024 statement from dozens of NGOs and environmental organisations called for countries and companies not to use GWP* in their greenhouse gas reporting or to guide their climate mitigation policies. They wrote:
“The risks of GWP* significantly outweigh the benefits.”
New Zealand
New Zealand is currently considering changing its biogenic methane target, including applying the “no additional warming” approach used in GWP*. If it does so, it could become the first country to adopt GWP*.
The nation is a major livestock producer and agriculture generates nearly half of all its greenhouse gas emissions.
The chart below shows that the agricultural sector is also responsible for more than 90% of the country’s methane emissions.
New Zealand has a legally binding target to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. However, biogenic methane has separate targets to reduce by 10% by 2030 and by 24-47% by 2050, compared to a baseline of 2017 levels.
In late 2024, a review from the nation’s Climate Change Commission recommended that the government change its 2050 greenhouse gas targets, including to increase the biogenic methane goal to a 35-47% reduction by 2050.
At the same time, an independent panel commissioned by the New Zealand government reviewed how the country’s climate targets would look under the “no additional warming” approach.
The resulting report, which did not look specifically at GWP*, but used a similar concept, found that a 14-15% cut in biogenic methane by 2050 would be “consistent with meeting the ‘no additional warming’ condition”, under mid-range global emissions scenarios that keep temperatures below 2C.
The government is “currently considering” these findings, a spokesperson for the Ministry for the Environment tells Carbon Brief in a statement.
The spokesperson says that the report is “part of the body of evidence” that the government will use in its response to the Climate Change Commission’s review, which it must publish by November 2025.
Cain, the Cranfield University lecturer who co-created GWP*, wrote in Climate Home News in 2019 that New Zealand reducing biogenic methane by 24% would “offset the warming impact” of the rest of the country’s emissions, adding:
“New Zealand could declare itself climate-neutral almost immediately, well before 2050 and only because farmers were reducing their methane emissions. That’s a free pass to all the other sectors, courtesy of New Zealand’s farmers.”
A report on GWP* by the Changing Markets Foundation found that, in 2020, 16 industry groups in New Zealand and the UK “urged” the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to use GWP* to assess warming impacts.
Australia
The Guardian reported in May 2024 that Cattle Australia, a cattle producer trade group, was “lobbying the red-meat sector to ditch its net-zero target in favour of a ‘climate-neutral’ goal that would require far more modest reductions in methane emissions”.
Cattle Australia’s senior adviser and former chief executive, Dr Chris Parker, tells Carbon Brief in a statement that the organisation is “working with the Australian government to ensure methane emissions within the biogenic carbon cycle are appropriately accounted for in our national accounting systems”. He adds:
“We believe GWP* offers a more accurate way of assessing methane’s temporary place in the atmosphere and its impact on the climate. Australian cattle producers are part of the climate solution and we need policy settings to enable them to participate in carbon markets.”
Australia’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water did not respond to Carbon Brief’s request for comment.
Ireland
Internal documents assessed for the Changing Markets Foundation’s GWP* report “suggest” that Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has advocated for GWP* “at the international level”, including at the UN’s COP26 climate summit in 2021.
Allen and Mitloehner were involved in a 2022 Irish parliamentary discussion on methane, in which Allen advocated for the country to “be a policy pioneer” by using GWP* in its methane reporting alongside standard methods.
The country’s coalition government, formed earlier this year, pledged to “recognise the distinct characteristics of biogenic methane” and also “advocate for the accounting of this greenhouse gas to be re-classified at EU and international level”.
A spokesperson for Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine tells Carbon Brief that this does not refer to using GWP* specifically. They say the country is “in favour of using accurate, scientifically validated and internationally accepted emission measurement metrics”, adding:
“It is important that the nature of how biogenic methane interacts in the environment is accurately reflected in how it is accounted for. This does not mean the use of the metric GWP*.”
In December 2024, Ireland’s Climate Change Advisory Council proposed temperature neutrality pathway options to the government that do not specifically refer to GWP*, but use the same concept of no “additional warming”.
The Irish Times reported that this was “in part to reduce potential disruption from Ireland’s legal commitment to achieve national ‘climate neutrality’ by 2050”.
The climate and energy minister, Darragh O’Brien, said he has “not formed a definitive view” on this, the newspaper noted, and that expert views will feed into ongoing discussions on the 2031-40 carbon budgets, which are due to be finalised later in 2025.
In an Irish Times opinion article, Prof Hannah Daly from University College Cork, described the temperature neutrality consideration as “one of the most consequential climate decisions this government will make”. She wrote that the approach “amounts to a free pass for continued high emissions” of livestock methane.
Paraguay
Paraguay mentioned GWP* in a national submission to the UN in 2023 after agribusiness representatives “pushed” to adopt the metric, according to Consenso, a Paraguayan online newsletter.
The country’s National Directorate of Climate Change told Consenso for a separate article related to GWP* that it is “aware” of questions around the metric, but that it “has the option of using other measurement systems” for emissions reporting.
UK
The National Farmers’ Union, the main farming representative group in England and Wales, is in favour of using GWP* to measure agricultural methane emissions.
Carbon Brief understands that the UK government is not currently considering using GWP* in addition to, or instead of, GWP100 in its emissions reporting.
What do experts think about the use of GWP*?
Most experts Carbon Brief spoke to agreed that GWP* could be a useful metric to apply to global methane emissions, but that it is difficult to apply equitably in individual countries or sectors. Rogelj believes that are are some contexts in which GWP* could be used, but adds:
“You cannot just take targets that were set and discussed historically with one greenhouse gas metric in mind – GWP100 under the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework on Climate Change] and the Paris Agreement and all that – [and] then simply apply a different metric to it. They change meaning entirely.
“So, if one would like to use GWP*, one should build the policy targets and frameworks from the ground up to take advantage of the strengths of that metric, but also put in place safeguards that ensure that the weaknesses and limitations of that metric do not result in unfair or undesirable outcomes.”
A 2022 study says that using GWP* in climate plans “would ask countries to start from scratch in terms of their political target setting processes”, calling it a “bold ask” for policymakers.
It adds that achieving net-zero emissions, as measured with GWP*, “would only lead to a stabilisation of temperatures at their peak level”.
However, a 2024 study found that GWP* gives a “dynamic” assessment of the warming impact of emissions that “better aligns with temperature goals” than GWP100, when measuring methane emissions from agriculture.
Allen believes that criticism over the use of GWP* is similar to “saying it’s a meaningless question” to consider the warming impact of a country or company’s actions. He adds:
“That seems a very strange position to me, because we need to know how different activities are contributing to global warming because we have a temperature target.
“In saying GWP* is a bad thing, what people are actually saying is it’s a bad thing to know the warming impact of our actions, which is a very strange thing to say.”
He says that such metrics help countries to make informed decisions on climate action, but that “we can’t expect metrics to make these decisions for us”.
Murphy-Bokern notes that GWP* could be useful in modelling global, rather than national, methane emissions to avoid high-emitting countries making small methane cuts to achieve “no additional warming”, rather than significantly reducing these emissions.
He says the metric would be particularly useful if global emissions were close to zero, as a way to target the final remaining emissions. But, he adds:
“We are so far away from that very happy situation, that the discussion now with GWP* is a huge distraction from the key objective, which is to reduce emissions.”
Mitloehner – and every expert Carbon Brief spoke with – agrees with this wider point. He says:
“The main point is we need to reduce emissions. In the case of livestock, we need to reduce methane emissions. And the question is how do we get it done? And how do we quantify the impacts that [that reduction] would have accurately and fairly? The other issues are issues that politicians have to answer.”
The post Q&A: What the ‘controversial’ GWP* methane metric means for farming emissions appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What the ‘controversial’ GWP* methane metric means for farming emissions
New Zealand’s parliament has adopted a controversial new law blocking a whole avenue of climate litigation and shutting down its most advanced corporate lawsuit, which has been blamed by the government for shaking business confidence and investment.
The Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill, expected to take effect in the coming days after it is formally signed by the Governor-General, prevents all current and future civil claims for climate loss or harm under tort law.
Justice minister Paul Goldsmith said last week that the aim was to give businesses “certainty around their climate change obligations”, noting it would not alter the government’s responsibilities under the Climate Change Response Act 2002 nor business obligations under the Emissions Trading Scheme.
“Our response to climate change is best managed by the Government at a national level and not through piece-meal litigation in the courts,” he added in a statement.
Such litigation, he said, “risks developing a new regime that contradicts the framework Parliament has already enacted” to tackle climate change.
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Experts say that despite dismissing the lawsuit, the ruling sets a precedent by confirming that climate science can establish legal liability for the damage caused by emissions
Goldsmith singled out a key domestic climate lawsuit brought by Northland iwi leader and activist Mike Smith against six big companies: dairy firms Fonterra and Dairy Holdings, energy firms Genesis Energy and Z Energy, New Zealand Steel and coal mining firm BT Mining. A seventh original defendant, Channel Infrastructure, was dropped after it permanently decommissioned its Marsden Point oil refinery.
Smith argued that these companies had caused him harm under public nuisance and negligence law, as well as a third breach of a duty to cease contributing to climate change that has yet to be tested domestically. He did not seek financial compensation, instead asking for the companies to immediately stop emitting or contributing to net greenhouse gas emissions.
In one of the most advanced corporate climate accountability lawsuits in the world, a trial had been scheduled for April 2027 after the Supreme Court unanimously allowed the case to continue.
Corporate lobbying in the shadows
Smith described the passing of the bill as “deeply concerning”, particularly as it coincided with the Supreme Court hearing another of his climate lawsuits. In that case, Smith v Attorney-General, he argues that the government’s response to climate change and its impacts on Māori communities in particular breaches rights to life and culture.
“That timing raises profound questions about the separation of powers and the rule of law,” said Smith. “Whatever one’s view of the merits of these cases, it is deeply troubling when parliament intervenes to remove a legal pathway while the courts are actively considering fundamental questions about climate responsibility, rights and the crown’s obligations.”
The bill – which says that no person (including the government) can be found liable in tort for emissions-related climate change effects – followed major lobbying efforts by the companies defending themselves in Smith’s lawsuit. They outlined a proposed legal amendment in a briefing note to the government in 2024.
The centre-right government has been fiercely criticised over its lack of transparency in relation to this lobbying activity. The national ombudsman recently found that the Prime Minister’s Office effectively withheld information requested by the Environmental Law Initiative about meetings, discussions and conversations regarding Smith’s case.
Green groups fail to stop bill
The bill sparked huge concern among environmental campaigners in New Zealand and elsewhere. Greenpeace Aotearoa called it a “shocking abuse of executive power” and the vast majority of submissions to a parliamentary inquiry said it should be rejected.
But in the end, it was adopted with little resistance, moving relatively smoothly through parliament, passing its third reading by 67 votes to 53. Sam Bookman, climate law lecturer at Melbourne Law School, told Climate Home News he was not surprised by this, given that the coalition government has a secure majority.
A complaint has been made to the UN special rapporteur on climate change and human rights by Smith, the National Iwi Chairs Forum Pou Tikanga and youth coalition Climate Clinic Aotearoa over what they see as the government’s heavy-handed approach. Smith is also challenging the new law in yet another lawsuit.
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Bookman thinks it “very unlikely” that such a challenge will succeed, noting that New Zealand’s constitution is firmly anchored in parliamentary sovereignty.
But the expert in climate law does not see the bill as the end of legal action in the country, noting that New Zealand has a “sophisticated climate litigation landscape with a growing number of specialist and experienced lawyers and NGOs”.
The country is also approaching its next general election in November, and some opposition parties have pledged to restore access to the courts if elected.
Amanda Larsson, global project lead on agriculture for Greenpeace International, said: “This law deserves to be tested, and I strongly encourage the international climate litigation community to unite and help defend New Zealanders’ fundamental right to hold polluters accountable before this becomes a global blueprint.”
Copycat legislation on the rise
New Zealand’s move is part of a small but growing legislative effort to shut down climate litigation around the world.
In the US, Republican politicians introduced legislation in the House and Senate in April that would shield fossil fuel firms from climate liability lawsuits. Similar laws have already been passed at state level in Tennessee, Utah, Iowa and Louisiana.
The German state of Bavaria has put forward a similar proposal to the Federal Council, aiming to block private climate claims as well as the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments imposing such liability. There are also proposals to limit available remedies and actions in the Netherlands and Belgium.
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Bookman said he expects more efforts to counter climate damages litigation and advised plaintiffs to think about how to respond, including drawing on broader support in opposing them.
“Even though it’s very hard for plaintiffs to win these types of cases, companies are very eager to avoid the expense, embarrassment and political accountability that come even with unsuccessful lawsuits,” he said.
The post New Zealand moves to protect business with law curtailing climate litigation appeared first on Climate Home News.
New Zealand moves to protect business with law curtailing climate litigation
Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara is the Executive Director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), an Indonesia-based economic think tank. Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the Director of the China-Indonesia desk at CELIOS.
Indonesia produces around 60% of the world’s nickel, a metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) – more than any other country in the world. But in 2026, the government sharply reduced how much of its nickel can be extracted from the ground.
Production quotas were reduced by around 40% this year compared to 2025. Weda Bay, the largest nickel mine on Earth, had its allowance cut by more than 70% and exhausted its full-year quota by the end of May, halting mining entirely; it cannot resume large-scale extraction until next year unless regulators grant an extension.
The policy has sparked a vivid debate in Indonesian policy circles: how can the country shift its strategy from a decade of mining vast quantities of cheap nickel to producing a high-value and low-carbon material that the rest of the world wants for EV batteries.
The cuts aren’t a silver bullet to clean up Indonesia’s nickel industry, whose smelters are powered by coal – the most polluting fossil fuels. But alongside stricter enforcement of environmental rules, it is one side of efforts to produce more sustainable nickel for a premium.
Restricting Indonesia’s nickel output
Production quotas were introduced to stop the collapse of nickel prices because of oversupply in the market. Prices had fallen more than 40% in 2023 alone and kept sliding as Indonesian supply kept growing, hitting a four-year low of around $13,900 a ton in late 2025.
Critics called the recent tightening of production quotas proof that Indonesia’s nickel strategy has failed, arguing that the industry shouldn’t need to throttle its own output to survive. But when assessed against what the policy was supposed to do – push up nickel prices – it has worked. Prices jumped to $20,000 a ton in May, the highest since 2024.
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Chinese industry groups representing companies that have invested billions to mine and refine the country’s nickel were furious, warning Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto that the cuts put $50 billion worth of investment at risk. But much of that Chinese capital is sunk into smelters and processing plants built specifically to run on Indonesian ore, and cannot simply be moved elsewhere. That gives Jakarta more room to hold its ground than the warning suggests.
Stronger environmental enforcement
Since the start of the year, Indonesia’s forestry task force has seized more than four million hectares of land from mines and plantations operating illegally in protected forests, collecting over two trillion rupiah ($113 million) in fines.
This included 148 hectares seized from Weda Bay for lacking a forestry permit. The share of nickel produced from illegal small-scale mining also fell from about a quarter in 2022 to roughly 10% by 2024.
The crackdown responds to serious environmental damages in the nickel industry. On Obi Island, a waste pond collapsed after heavy rain in June 2025, flooding three villages and killing a resident. Internal company tests found chromium-6 – a carcinogen – in the water, in quantities far above the legal limit. The footprint of another mine near Raja Ampat, which is home to some of the world’s richest coral reefs, grew 60-fold in just eight years.
The market is responding to early cleanup efforts. Low-carbon nickel now sells for a real premium, roughly $18,800 to $19,300 a ton compared with $17,900 to $18,300 otherwise, as carmakers seek to source cleaner materials to comply with the European Union’s new emissions rules for imports.
In turn, this is incentivising the industry to do more to green its operations. Vale Indonesia’s smelter in South Sulawesi now runs almost entirely on hydropower, for example.
None of this addresses coal use, however. Major Indonesian nickel producers still emitted an estimated 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023. Indonesia may be cracking down on illegal mining and rewarding cleaner producers but it is still running its mines on the dirtiest fuel available.
Unequal benefits
For Indonesia to truly benefit from producing cleaner and high-value nickel, it needs to reap the economic benefits too. Although the industry has boosted the country’s economic growth, the reality on the ground tells a different story.
Konawe in Southeast Sulawesi is home to a major smelting complex. Growth in the district jumped from 6% to 22% between 2015 and 2023, driven almost entirely by the nickel industry, according to a study by the Lowy Institute study. At the same time, poverty levels increased slightly and unemployment remained unchanged.
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In Halmahera, another epicentre of the nickel industry, spending by the poorest fifth grew just 5% between 2019 and 2022, compared with 28% for the wealthiest fifth, according to a separate study.
Part of the reason for this inequality is the system for transferring mining royalties to district authorities where the mines are located. In theory, they are entitled to the largest share. But in practice, payments are delayed, companies routinely dispute what they owe and royalties are pooled and distributed across a larger area.
The Natural Resource Governance Institute has found that decentralisation handed local governments power to approve new mines faster than they could build their capacity to manage them. Higher output raises national income on paper, but local governments remain constrained by fiscal rules and infrastructure costs that scale with mining.
None of this makes the 2026 quota cuts a mistake. Indonesia has every right to defend its pricing power over a resource it controls. But limiting extraction isn’t going to fix underlying issues around environmental enforcement and revenue-sharing. That requires rules that are consistently enforced, royalties that reach communities living by the mines, and a plan to wean smelters off coal.
The post Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry appeared first on Climate Home News.
Indonesia’s nickel production cuts are not enough to create a sustainable industry
Climate Change
Risk of “catastrophic” oil spill reaching Kimberley coast found in Woodside’s Scott Reef gas drilling plans
SYDNEY, Monday 24 August 2026 – New analysis of Woodside modelling released by Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Environs Kimberley has revealed the oil and gas corporation’s plans to drill at Scott Reef could cause an oil spill up to 30 times bigger than the 2009 Montara disaster, impacting the Kimberley coastline and reaching as far as Indonesia.
The new analysis details the “catastrophic” oil spill risk put to environmental regulators for approval by Woodside in its Browse to North West Shelf Project (Browse) plans, the worst-case scenario being a blowout directly below Scott Reef, polluting whale migratory pathways and covering isolated turtle nesting ground with oil condensate.
An FOI application (F348) revealed the federal environment department (DCCEEW) asked offshore oil and gas regulator NOPSEMA to look into the oil spill risk in 2025. NOPSEMA’s response to the application refused access to its report, and one document shows DCCEEW sought further advice this year.
Greenpeace and Environs Kimberley are calling on the Federal Government to publicly release the NOPSEMA report given the risk of an uncontrolled release of oil condensate from directly below Scott Reef.
Hannah Schuch, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Woodside is aware that drilling at Scott Reef risks a massive oil spill that would have severe, far-reaching consequences. It appears environmental regulators are aware too.
“The state and federal governments need to take this risk from Woodside’s drilling plans seriously, as they could end up allowing the worst oil spill in Australian history.
“The pygmy blue whales that migrate up and down the WA coast with their newborns each year could be swimming and feeding in toxic, oil-slicked water. Woodside’s proposal to drill at Scott Reef is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, and the WA and federal governments have one surefire way to prevent catastrophe — reject Browse.”
Martin Prichard, Executive Director at Environs Kimberley, said: “A catastrophic oil spill by Woodside would be disastrous not just for marine life in the area but also for the Kimberley’s $500 million tourism industry.
“The state and federal governments will see five marine parks on the Kimberley coast included in the risk area of a catastrophic Woodside oil spill.
“The Montara oil spill was disastrous for West Timor with the toxic oil destroying seaweed farmers’ livelihoods. The Kimberley dodged a bullet with Montara, we were lucky the spill didn’t head our way. Myself and a crew flew over the Montara oil spill and followed it as far as we could. It was like a scene from a disaster movie.”
After the WA Environmental Protection Authority deemed Browse “unacceptable” due, in part, to oil spill risk, Woodside submitted a mitigation plan based on technology that has never been used “in anger”, a weakness stated in an independent expert review of the plan.
Professor Richard Steiner, independent oil spill expert, said: “A large offshore spill is impossible to effectively contain or recover. Historically, only 2-6% of total spill volume is recovered and the ecological injury from the release of toxic hydrocarbons in the sea can be severe, extensive, and long-term.
“Here in Alaska, government research concludes that several marine populations injured by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, including whales, fish, and seabirds, are still not recovering today, 37 years later. We should expect similar long-term ecological impacts in Western Australia if there were to be a major oil spill. The only sure way to avoid the risk of a catastrophic marine oil spill is to not develop oil and gas projects in marine environments.”
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Media contact
Emma Sangalli on emma.sangalli@greenpeace.org or 0431 513 465
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