GWP100 or GWP*: Meat, dairy lobby pushing for new methane metric. How this will enable greenwashing

Subject : Environment

Sectional: Climate Change

Context:

Some of the world’s big, industrialised meat and dairy companies have been promoting a new metric for measuring methane emissions, called GWP* (pronounced as GWP star), which they argue is a more accurate way to calculate emissions from the greenhouse gas (GHG).
However, by adopting this new method, they can manipulate their overall GHG emissions and escape accountability by falsely claiming climate neutrality, a new report has revealed.

Details:

The established metric under the 2015 Paris Agreement for measuring the global warming potential of a gas over a 100-year period is GWP100, which is the global warming potential evaluated over a 100-year timeline. It focuses on the absolute level of emissions.
GWP100 measures the warming effect of a quantity of a non-carbon dioxide (CO2) GHG, emitted at a given point in time, relative to an equal amount of CO2.

About GWP*:

GWP* was developed in 2016 by a team of researchers from Oxford University, led by two academics who argued it was more accurate than the current systems used to report national methane emissions at the international level.
It was then introduced in 2018 at the 24th Conference of Parties (COP24) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC).
GWP* focuses on changes in emissions over decadal timescales rather than absolute levels.
- By taking current levels of methane emissions as their baseline, high-polluting countries and companies can use GWP* to present even minor reductions in methane as negative emissions or cooling.
New Zealand, where half of all emissions come from agriculture, mostly methane, showed that with a modest 10 per cent reduction in methane emissions, the country could report negative methane using GWP* by 2038.

Efforts to push for GWP*:

The big agriculture lobby is pushing the GWP* methodology in New Zealand, Ireland, the United States and other regions.
At least 16 industry groups across the UK and New Zealand have jointly urged the IPCC in 2020 to adopt GWP* for assessing warming impacts.

Why GWP* is contentious:

The ability to easily compare the contributions of different gases to climate change to assign accountability and set fair goals is crucial for global climate commitments.
The time horizon used to determine the GWP is important because it affects how much weight is given to short-term warming.
GWP* has been criticized on a global policy level because it has the potential to reward the highest historically polluting countries or companies for their past GHG emissions by giving them credit for slight decreases from a high baseline.
The methodology will also penalise countries with historically low levels of methane emissions for small increases.