Tim Groser

Wellington, March 31 NZPA - More than 80 science and policy representatives from 28 nations will attend next week's Wellington launch of the Government's much-hyped "global research alliance" on agricultural greenhouse gases.

The inaugural meeting at Te Papa is aimed at creating the platform for collaborative research into growing food with fewer emissions, and has been promoted by Climate Change Negotiations Minister Tim Groser as "the next big event in the climate change calendar".

Mr Groser and Agriculture Minister David Carter will host the three-day meeting of the Global Research Alliance starting on Wednesday.

It will be opened by Prime Minister John Key, who used the proposal for global cooperation in reducing agricultural emissions as a major plank in his pitch to a United Nations climate change summit in September.

The Government has budgeted $45 million over four years to the alliance, the United States has promised $NZ127m over five years, and Canada $NZ37m over four years.

Separately, the Government is spending $50m on a domestic Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, based in Palmerston North.

Mr Key said at the time New Zealand could potentially play a leading role in scientific research into greenhouse gas emissions, because of the quality of its scientists and the fact that it was a developed nation with a large agricultural footprint.

Agriculture accounts for 48 percent of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions -- much of it made up of methane emissions from livestock, and nitrous oxide from the urine of cattle and sheep.

Mr Groser said today that members of the alliance wanted to increase international cooperation, collaboration and investment in both public and private research to cut agricultural emissions while meeting rising demands for food.

"While the focus for this meeting is on the Alliance's shape and design, we also expect to make significant progress on establishing how we get the research underway," he said.

By the end of next week's meeting, he hoped to have established working groups, developed a process for conducting a stocktake of existing research, and discussed priority setting and opportunities for encouraging wider participation.

The alliance is expected to initially divide its work into four sectors: extensive livestock -- the kind of pastoral grazing common in New Zealand -- intensive livestock, arable farming and cropping, and rice paddy.