Robert Paarlberg, who leads a research project on methane emitted by cattle (enteric methane) supported by the Harvard Initiative on Reducing Global Methane Emissions, participated in a seminar at San Francisco Climate Week on April 22, 2025. The meeting was convened by Spark Climate Solutions and the Clean Air Task Force and titled “Accelerating Methane-Reducing Technologies in Agriculture and Innovative Market-based Mechanisms.” Paarlberg presented his research on methane-reduction challenges in beef and dairy systems in the Global South, which is now the source of three quarters of all enteric methane emissions worldwide. 

The first session featured an animal breeder who was selecting for low-methane rumen traits in dairy animals; a representative of Indianapolis-based Elanco, which has been selling Bovaer, a new, commercially approved feed additive to bring down methane emissions; and the developer of a still experimental methane “vaccine,” designed to stimulate the immune systems of cattle to attack the methanogens in the rumen that produce methane. All expressed optimism regarding the potential for new technical interventions in this area. All had advanced scientific credentials and deep experience with livestock operations.

Paarlberg’s presentation in the second session identified barriers to the uptake of new methane-reducing technologies. Participants agreed that the largest challenge would be creating a financial incentive for farmers – especially in the Global South – to adopt feed additives, vaccines, and other innovations, which reduce methane emissions but cost time and money, without promising an increase in farm income. Paarlberg agreed with his fellow panelists that for modern large-scale livestock operations in Europe and the United States, it might be possible to capture and deliver benefits to farm operators by creating an online “inset” market that credits these operators for self-reporting the use of feed additives such as Bovaer. Large food companies, like Danone and Nestlé, could then buy these credits to help in meeting their own ambitious Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions reduction pledges. 

Paarlberg expressed skepticism, however, that online inset credit markets would work well for small, fragmented, more traditional beef and dairy operators in the Global South. In India, a major source of global methane emissions from milk production, roughly 70 percent of all dairy animals are managed by poor individual households in rural villages, typically in herds of 5 animals or fewer. These households would find it difficult to use an online inset credit system to record the daily use of feed additives, and the credit creation process would be impossible to monitor and verify. Including the proper dose of a daily additive in the traditional feed of these animals – which rely on pasture grass, crop residues, and tree leaves, rather than on measured rations of compound feeds – would be an impossible management challenge as well.

For traditional pasture-based beef and dairy systems in the Global South, Paarlberg suggested that the surest path to methane reductions might be improved, high-energy feed rations for these animals, along with improved animal genetics, helping them to gain weight more quickly and give more milk on a daily basis, thereby reducing the methane burden per unit of their production. This is the path that beef and dairy systems took over the past 75 years in the Global North, and the result has been a dramatic reduction in methane intensity compared to traditional systems. Because livestock systems in the Global South are only now beginning to go down this productivity path, they now emit three times as much methane for every pound of beef they produce compared to the United States, and up to ten times as much methane for every liter of milk.

A step-by-step productivity upgrade would be welcomed by producers in the Global South, since it would increase their income. It is less complicated and more sustainable to reward cattle owners through commercial sales into an actual market, as opposed to relying (forever?) on purchases by pledge-keeping companies in an artificial inset credit market. The methane reductions achieved would come more slowly, but they would in the end be larger and more durable, and attractive side benefits would come as well, including reduced pasture expansion, as well as more protected biodiversity and wildlife habitat.

Robert Paarlberg is an Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Wellesley College. He is the author of six books and numerous papers and reports on agriculture and food policy.