Ensuring Korea’s Methane Mitigation Efforts are 1.5-degree Aligned
About
The Korean government released a methane reduction roadmap in November 2023, demonstrating alignment with global methane reduction initiatives. The roadmap establishes a 30% methane reduction target by 2030 from 2020 levels, with sector-specific reduction targets across waste (49%), agriculture and livestock (34.2%), and energy (22.7%). However, questions remain about the roadmap’s alignment with Korea’s long-term carbon neutrality goals and integration with existing national strategies, including the 2050 Carbon Neutrality Scenarios and the 2050 Carbon Neutral Strategy for Agriculture and Food. Solutions for Our Climate conducted an analysis whether the government's methane reduction targets for the waste, agriculture, and energy sectors to meet the 30% reduction target in 2030 are feasible in the medium to long term through 2050.
Download report
Executive summary
Analysis of the sectoral pathways reveals the following:
◦ Based on the government’s 2050 Carbon Neutrality Scenarios, the energy sector must achieve accelerated reductions, requiring negative emissions after 2040.
◦ The agriculture/livestock and waste sectors face inherent constraints on methane reduction beyond 2040, largely due to the difficulty of reducing livestock numbers and rice paddies.
These findings indicate that the current sectoral targets in the reduction roadmap may not be sufficient to meet Korea’s 2050 carbon neutrality goals and warrant reassessment.
The report models three different approaches to achieve net zero by 2050: namely national emissions-based, population-based, and GDP-based projections. While Korea’s 2030 target appears adequate under the national emissions criterion, a population-based analysis, which factors in methane contributions linked to international trade alongside territorial emissions, shows that the current methane reduction target falls short.
Solutions for Our Climate considers the population-based approach the most accurate in reflecting Korea’s full methane reduction commitments, since Korea must take responsibility for the methane emissions coming from international trade as well as emissions from within the country. Given that the Global Methane Pledge frames the 2030 methane reduction target as “at least” 30%, these findings suggest Korea’s current 2030 target requires upward revision.
Based on these findings, Solutions for Our Climate anticipates the establishment of robust legislative and policy frameworks to achieve meaningful methane emission reductions and urges the following improvements to Korea’s national methane reduction roadmap:
- Strengthen national methane reduction targets to align with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C climate threshold by 2050;
- Enhance the energy sector’s reduction targets to match the ambition demonstrated in other sectors, particularly agriculture and livestock.
Key findings
The Energy sector must achieve accelerated reductions, requiring negative emissions after 2040. This requires reducing both domestic fugitive emissions, emissions from overseas resource development projects and fossil fuel imports.
The population-based model requires over 2x methane reduction by 2030 (about 18 million tonnes CO2 equivalent methane reduction) compared to the government targets from the Methane reduction roadmap (8.3 million tonnes CO2 equivalent).