Climate change: New Zealand's plan to tax cow and sheep burps

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New Zealand wants to tax sheep and cattle burps in order to reduce greenhouse gases.

It will be the first nation to charge farmers for methane emissions from their animals.

Around 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep are in New Zealand.

Methane is the main greenhouse gas emission from agriculture.

The omission of agricultural emissions from New Zealand's emissions trading scheme has been criticized by those calling for the government to do more.

New Zealand's climate change minister James Shaw said there is no question that we need to cut the amount of methane we are putting into the atmosphere.

Farmers will have to pay for their emissions in the future.

Incentives for farmers who reduce emissions through feed Additives are included in the plan.

The president of Federated Farmers of New Zealand said that he broadly approved of the proposal.

We've been working with the government and other organizations for a long time to get an approach that won't shut down farming in New Zealand.

"Like all of these types of agreements with many parties involved, there's always going to be a couple of dead rats you have to swallow," he said.

The fine details of the plan's roll out have not been agreed.

There are still nuts and bolts to be hammered out, like who implements the scheme, so there's still stuff to work through with the government.

The money raised from the scheme will be invested in research, development and advisory services for farmers.

The finance minister of New Zealand made a commitment to tackle climate change last month.

The investors urged the UN to create a plan to make the agriculture sector sustainable.

In a letter to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation's director-general, the FAIRR Initiative said the agency was best placed to take the lead on creating a road map to curb one of the biggest sources of climate damaging.

Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas, followed by methane.

It is responsible for a third of the current warming from humans. Individual methane molecule have a warmer atmosphere than single CO2 molecule.

The US and the EU agreed to cut emissions by 30% by 2030. New Zealand is one of more than 100 countries that have joined the initiative.

Around 40% of CH4 comes from natural sources such as wetlands, but the bigger share now comes from a variety of human activities.

One of the biggest sources of methane emissions is from the production, transport and use of natural gas and since 2008 there has been a big spike in methane emissions.

Methane levels in the atmosphere were two-and-a-half times higher than they were before the industrial revolution.

Scientists worry about methane's ability to heat the planet. It is warming as much as CO2 over the course of a century.

It is 84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over the course of 20 years.

Individual molecule of CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.