Methane-busting solutions must be scaled up and farmers incentivised for using them, as production of the dangerous gas hits the highest levels in 800,000 years, a report says.

The Climate Council report calls for immediate action on methane reduction targets and a rethink on how the greenhouse gas is tackled by the agricultural and mining sectors.

“Methane is increasing at a rapid rate and it has now reached a level unseen in the last 800,000 years,” report author Lesley Hughes told AAP.

While the world has been focused on reducing its climate pollution, methane has been dangerously overlooked. Find out more: https://t.co/Cqp9f6AUD9 pic.twitter.com/a40YAD8BIZ

— Climate Council (@climatecouncil) July 30, 2024

The report highlights a series of practical steps Australia can take to tackle methane in the agriculture, fossil fuels and waste industries.

“Australia produces an outsized share of global methane pollution, due to our large fossil fuel mining and agriculture industries,” it found.

The report proposes large-scale livestock trials under a range of Australian environmental conditions to test the efficacy of feed supplements and other emerging solutions in tackling methane.

Part of the solution is to incentivise farmers to adopt new technologies such as feeding animals the methane-busting supplements, Professor Hughes said.

“It has to be an approved methodology, then the farmers can claim carbon credits by using that methodology,” she said.

“Farmers will need financial incentives to deploy the technologies that we have, but we also need more research to scale those technologies up.”

The Climate Council also called for more education around the environmental benefits of choosing a vegetarian or vegan diet.

“More Australians may choose to eat less meat and dairy products …  if they were more aware of the significant climate and environmental impacts of food production and the available alternatives,” the report said.

But producers have hit back citing the red meat sector’s 2030 carbon-neutrality goal.

“It’s short-sighted and uninformed to suggest consumers need to turn their back on meat as a protein source,” National Farmers’ president David Jochinke told AAP.

“It also ignores red meat is an excellent source of nutrition, and alternatives like lab-grown meat are more energy intensive when produced at scale.”

He stressed that producers are already leading the charge on climate action in Australia, having already reduced the sector’s emissions by about 59 per cent on 2005 levels.

The report takes aim at inaction by the Australian government for signing the Global Methane Pledge in 2022 to slash global methane pollution by almost one-third by 2030, without following up with any targets.

“We’ve got no target and no plan for any sector to meet the commitment,” Hughes said.

But the Albanese government said it was “taking strong action” across agriculture and industry to combat methane, including spending $8 million to support the commercialisation of the methane-busting seaweed, asparagopsis.

Proposals for new methods for carbon credits are also being considered, according to a spokesperson for Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen.

“The government’s reformed Safeguard Mechanism already covers almost three-quarters of methane from industrial sources and methane emissions reduction remains a strong focus of the sectoral net-zero plans currently being developed,” the spokesperson said.

The Climate Council repeated its calls for an end to the approval of new and expanded coal mines and said cutting methane pollution should be a condition of continuing approval for the highest emitters.

Australia and other countries might be significantly under-counting methane pollution, the report said.

The International Energy Agency estimates Australia could be under-reporting methane emissions from coal and gas by as much as 60 per cent.

-AAP