The world’s ten largest meat companies are “failing to tackle methane emissions” from their industrial livestock operations and “masking the true scale of their climate harms on global heating”, a new report by Mighty Earth has warned.
Analysis of methane emission reporting by the NGO found “not a single company has a plan to cut methane by 30% by 2030”, in line with the UN-backed Global Methane Pledge (GMP).
And while most companies did recognise the “outsized role of livestock methane in global heating”, for the most part they were “doing nothing to address it”, claimed the campaign group – citing research from the Nature Food scientific journal in 2021, which claimed animal-based food production was responsible for 57% of all global food production emissions.
Manure management and enteric fermentation in ruminant animals such as cattle and sheep, which produce methane as a byproduct of the digestive process, represented 32% of human-caused methane emissions, Mighty Earth said.
But only one company, Marfrig, prior to the publication of its research this week, and following outreach as part of Mighty Earth’s research, had committed to a methane reduction target and disclosure, the NGO said in its ‘Cow in the Room’ report.
The Brazilian meat giant recently developed an action plan to achieve a 33% reduction by 2035. However, the campaign group warned this action still “falls short” of the reductions required. The GMP calls for a commitment to reduce absolute methane emissions across value chains by at least 30% or recommended 45% by 2030, relative to a 2020 baseline.
It comes as a status report on the GMP published by the UN Environment Programme during last month’s COP30 summit in the Amazon found efforts still fell “far short” of the 30% target, with just 4% of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) even quantifying time-bound agricultural methane targets.
Read more: Supermarkets ‘playing with fire’ as climate action lags, WWF warns
Mighty Earth’s report also claimed just half of the top ten meat companies assessed had net-zero commitments, with most “adopting weak, loophole-filled language that shields them from accountability”.
Cargill and JBS, meanwhile, “understate their total emissions by omitting emissions associated with land-use change”, it added.
And in the case of JBS, the difference was estimated to be almost 85 million tons of CO2e, or approximately a 54% additional share of JBS’s reported GHG emissions for 2023.
None of the companies assessed even disclosed methane emissions which came directly from meat products, the report also pointed out, while none had plant-based alternative production targets.
“It’s tantamount to climate crime that most meat companies are stubbornly refusing to address the cow in the room: methane,” said Mighty Earth climate director Gemma Hoskins.
“Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that has an outsized negative impact on the climate. Deep and rapid cuts to methane emissions would quickly slow down global heating and help communities on the frontline of the climate crisis,” she added.
It was “entirely possible for meat companies to disclose their methane emissions, and to develop methane reduction strategies”, Hoskins claimed. “The world’s second largest beef company, Marfrig, showed this can be done, days before the launch of this report, and committed to a 33% cut in methane emissions by 2035. Now, we need the rest of this super polluting meat sector to follow Marfrig’s lead.”
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