Signatories to the WBA’s Biogas Industry and Climate Change Declaration of November 2019 gathered on 11 February for a virtual roundtable to discuss how best to represent biogas at the forthcoming COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow in November.

At the meeting, WBA’s guest speaker Niclas Svenningsen, of UN Climate Action – the secretariat for the UNFCCC – provided an update on preparation to the summit and what the biogas industry should do to make an impact on COP26 discussions.

Niclas highlighted the fact that this forthcoming conference will mark the transition from negotiation to implementation and the need for governments, industry, civil society and other stakeholders to work together to deliver on climate change issues.

Although whether the event will take place physically or virtually is still under review, WBA has applied for a stand in order to showcase the power of biogas as a solution to methane emissions and how the industry can deliver the “circular economy of organic wastes”.

This will be the core message of WBA in its forthcoming report, Biogas – Pathways to 2030, which will be launched on 29 March 2021. Participants to the Roundtable reviewed the report’s Executive Summary, which emphasises the huge benefit of recycling all organic wastes through anaerobic digestion (AD) and producing biogas in tackling climate change.  It explores how governments can unlock the full value of their own bioresources through policy and regulation; step one, for example, being to set ambitious decarbonisation targets and incorporate biogas into their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), to help maintain climate warming well below 2°c.

It will clearly demonstrate that “there’s no Net Zero without biogas”, a reality that should resonate with the UNFCCC following the launch of its “Race to Net Zero” campaign in the build up to COP26 – a campaign with which WBA will engage to secure its place at this biggest of table.