Russian Federation's policies on climate change

Historical and Political Context

Several major themes in Russia’s history influence the nation’s political, military, and economic actions to the present day. Among them are its geographic and cultural isolation from the rest of Europe and repeated invasions from both Europe and Asia. The hardships endured by Russians throughout their history have created a deep sense of tragedy that is readily apparent in Russian literature and music and that has led to a pervasive political culture of suspicion against external and internal threats.

During the nineteenth century, Russia alternated between periods of reform and repression, as some rulers (czars) attempted to enact long-overdue reforms and others resorted to repression to control the mounting pressures for change. Following Russia’s catastrophic losses during World War I (1914–18), a revolution deposed the last czar, only to be followed by the overthrow of the new government during the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. The Bolsheviks (from the Russian word bolshe, meaning “more”) were so called because they became the majority faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The system of government imposed by the Bolsheviks, called communism, was an attempt to implement the economic theories of Karl Marx. Under communism, the state owned and ran all businesses. The former Russian Empire was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or Soviet Union).

In theory,communism was supposed to act on behalf of the people. In practice, it was inefficient and repressive. The worst repression came under the rule of Joseph Stalin, who controlled the country from 1922 to 1953. Stalin’s attempt rapidly to industrialize the Soviet Union resulted in famines in which millions died, and in the 1930s he launched a vast campaign of terror, called the Great Purge, during which millions of alleged enemies of the state were killed or exiled to prison camps. During World War II (1939–45), the armies of Nazi Germany drove deep into Russia before being driven out, and more than 20 million Russians died, including many civilians who fell victim to German war crimes.

After World War II, the Soviet Union succeeded in imposing communist governments in much of Eastern Europe and emerged as the main geopolitical rival of the United States and its allies. The rivalry was expressed in a long period of tension called the Cold War (1947–91), which saw no direct warfare but many “proxy wars” in which the United States and Soviet Union supported opposing sides. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union moderated its internal repression somewhat, although it remained highly authoritarian, and it advanced rapidly in military and space technology. Having acquired nuclear weapons by 1949, the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite in 1957 and the first human in space in 1961. By the late 1980s, Soviet leaders, aware of growing problems in the Soviet system, began inaugurating reforms, but the reforms failed to prevent the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Roughly one-quarter of the area of the Soviet Union and half of its population—former satellite states, or soviets—seceded from Russia to form fourteen independent countries.

Russia struggled economically throughout the 1990s as the country reorganized itself into the Russian Federation, but by the early 2000s had begun to recover while under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. His leadership saw Russia take a number of steps to reassert its status as a military and economic power throughout the 2010s. However, Russia's invasion of Ukraine during Putin's tenure hurt the country economically, in part because of Western sanctions on the country in response to the war.

Impact of Russian Policies on Climate Change

Under communism, many of the important themes of Russian history reasserted themselves. The cult of suspicion that long pervaded Russian thinking produced a vast secret police and prison camp system, tight controls on dissent and access to information, and tight controls on outside access. The Soviet Union vigorously disseminated propaganda, displaying its greatest successes in an effort to persuade others of the superiority of its system, while simultaneously making it difficult or impossible to learn about failures. Furthermore, the Soviet Union focused its efforts on heavy industry, military power, and spectacular achievements in technology, to the detriment of the consumer sector and the environment.

In one respect, the Soviet Union was a victim of its own success. It succeeded in portraying itself as far more militarily powerful than it actually was, and the resulting arms race with the United States was a principal factor in finally bankrupting the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union also succeeded in portraying itself as having far better social services and concern for the environment than it really did, and the limited access to much of the Soviet Union made it difficult for outsiders to learn the real extent of the nation’s environmental disasters. The secret police system stifled even constructive dissent, so foreigners and Russians alike remained uninformed about even grave environmental problems. The reality was that in remote industrial areas of the Soviet Union there were appalling toxic chemical accidents, oil spills, and pollution.

Two environmental disasters are emblematic of the environmental problems Russia has inherited from the former Soviet Union. The 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (located in the present Ukraine) was the worst nuclear reactor accident in history. The cause of the Chernobyl disaster has been attributed both to operator errors and to poor reactor design, but it is clear from all accounts that the accident was the result of conducting a crucial test when only a skeleton crew was on duty, that many of the workers were inexperienced and familiar only with conventional power plants, that monitoring devices did not adequately reflect the developing crisis, and that neither the reactor crew nor first responders were aware of the radiation danger (and many died as a result). The meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor released radioactive fallout into the atmosphere that eventually extended across the western Soviet Union, Europe, and eastern North America; more than 300,000 people had to be evacuated and resettled, and parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were severely contaminated.

The drying up of the Aral Sea (actually a large lake shared by present Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) has been called the greatest environmental disaster of modern times. Because of water diversion for agriculture, the lake shrank in area by three quarters between 1960 and 2008. By 2014 the sea's eastern basin had completely dried up for the first time in six hundred years. A number of plans intended to improve this situation were attempted in the 2010s and 2020s with a small measure of success, but the region continued to struggle with the consequences of this environmental disaster, including dust storms and a lack of clean drinking water.

On February 24, 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine, which had been part of Russia until the early twentieth century. Putin likely believed that an independent Ukraine trying to join NATO was a threat to Russia, so he sought to take back at least parts of the country. Russian soldiers attacked many sites throughout Ukraine, which was given weapons and money by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. These countries also issued harsh sanctions on Russia, which hurt the country economically.

These events all typify the Soviet-era tendency to ignore future risks and environmental dangers in favor of immediate practical results, coupled with poor planning and lack of accountability to the society. Although Russia reformed many features of its government and economy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many of its regulatory agencies remained inefficient or corrupt. In such an environment, there are many opportunities to ignore greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards or divert funds meant for modernization.

Russia as a GHG Emitter

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, in 1990 Russia emitted 2.763 billion metric tons of GHGs measured in equivalent, the amount of CO₂ that would have the same effect as the gas in question. (For example, 1 metric ton of methane is measured as about 20 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent.) These 1990 emissions accounted for about one-sixth of total global GHG emissions for 1990, the year before the Soviet Union dissolved. By 1999, thanks to Russia’s economic collapse and the shutdown of many industries, emissions fell to 1.699 billion metric tons of CO₂ equivalent. By 2005, Russia’s emissions had risen to 1.932 billion metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, still 28.7 percent below their 1990 levels. In 2021 the country emitted 1.76 billion metric tons of CO₂ equivalent.

In 2004, Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Thanks to its economic decline, Russia was already below its Kyoto emissions target. The Kyoto Protocol called for a 5 percent reduction in GHG emissions from 1990 levels by 2008, but Russia’s emissions in 2005 were 28.7 percent below 1990 levels. As analyst John Carey pointed out, Russia’s low emissions were a “valuable commodity” that it could trade under emissions-trading rules. The trading proved advantageous to other European nations, because it was cheaper for them to buy emissions credits from Russia than to remodel their own industries. Russia’s ratification pushed the protocol over the threshold for entry into legal force. The ratification was opposed by the United States, which was left as the only leading industrial nation not to have ratified the protocol at that time.

The next major international climate agreement came with the Paris Agreement, which was negotiated at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, France. Russia signed this treaty in 2015 but did not formally ratify it until 2019. Compared to other major economic powers at that time, such as the US and China, Russia had taken fewer steps to pursue carbon neutrality, in part because it had easily met the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. While climate change initiatives were part of a government energy strategy announced in 2020, wind and solar power only accounted for .32 percent of the energy in Russia's power grid during that year. At that time, experts expressed hope that Russia would begin to invest in the green energy sector, due to the country's vast potential to generate energy through wind and solar power. Despite this slow start, in 2021, before the war with Ukraine, Putin announced plans for Russia to pursue carbon neutrality by 2060.

Russia is one of the world’s largest oil producers, third in the world in 2021 after Saudi Arabia and the US, with large reserves of both oil and natural gas. In 2021 Russia produced an average of 10.9 million barrels of oil a day. Russia's competition with Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has, at times, led to tension, including a price war in 2020 that led to plummeting oil prices. Despite these occasional challenges, international sales of petroleum and natural gas were long a major source of revenue for Russia. In 2021 this revenue made up 45 percent of Russia's federal budget. However, the country's oil and gas industry faced a serious setback in 2022 after the European Union, one of the industry's largest customers, banned most Russian oil and gas imports following Russia's invasion of Ukraine that year.

Summary and Foresight

For the first decades of the twenty-first century, some of the major issues hindering Russia from rebuilding its economy and forging stronger international ties were widespread corruption, organized crime, and the country's increasing military aggression. According to many accounts, a substantial amount of the cost of any business venture is bribes to the bureaucrats responsible for approving the project. Organized crime existed under communism as a widespread black market, and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, organized crime quickly gained control of many sectors of the Russian economy. Numerous journalists and business leaders who threatened to expose corruption or refused to pay bribes to organized crime gangs have been assassinated. Russian organized crime has also emerged as a world leader in cybercrime, such as online identity theft and distribution of computer malware. The Russian government, at times, also became involved in cybercrime, including its attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States.

The country's economic growth was also, at times, complicated by Putin's military ambitions, which grew increasingly bold throughout the 2010s and 2020s. The country's 2008 invasion of Georgia and 2014 annexation of Crimea, which was part of neighboring Ukraine, drew international criticism and led to sanctions from the US and many other countries. The international response to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine resulted in Russia facing the most severe political and economic isolation it had seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin's tenure also saw Russia's government become more authoritarian; this trend first became clear in the 2000s and 2010s with the imprisonment or assassination of some of Putin's critics and political rivals, but by the early 2020s, particularly after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, had expanded to include harsher censorship and a government crackdown on the media. Russia's increasingly isolated status at this time complicated its efforts to maintain economic growth and fulfill its long-term climate goals.

Key Facts

• Population: 142,021,981 (2022 estimate); population of former Soviet Union: 293,047,571 (July, 1991)
• Area: 17,098,242 square kilometers; area of former Soviet Union: 22,402,200 square kilometers
• Gross domestic product (GDP):$4.078 trillion (purchasing power parity, 2021 estimate)
• Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e): 2,763 in 1990; 1,699 in 1999; 1,932 in 2005; 1,760 in 2021
• Kyoto Protocol status: Ratified, 2004
• Paris Agreement status:Ratified, 2019

Bibliography

Carey, John. “Russia’s Path to Kyoto.” BusinessWeek, October 1, 2004.

Korppoo, Anna, Jacqueline Karas, and Michael Grubb, eds. Russia and the Kyoto Protocol: Opportunities and Challenges. London: Chatham House, 2006.

Mambra, Shamseer. “Aral Sea Disaster: Why One of the Biggest Inland Seas Dried Up?” Marine Insight, 16 Jan. 2024, www.marineinsight.com/environment/aral-sea-disaster-why-one-of-the-biggest-inland-seas-dried-up/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.

Mitrova, Tatiana. “Is Russia Finally Ready to Tackle Climate Change?” The Global Think Tank, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 27 July 2021, carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/85043. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.

“Russia.” CIA World Factbook, 11 Dec. 2024, www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/russia/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.

“Russian Federation.” Climate Action Tracker, 9 Nov. 2022, climateactiontracker.org/countries/russian-federation/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.

Zagoruichyk, Anastasia. “The Carbon Brief Profile: Russia.” CarbonBrief, 22 Sept. 2022, www.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-profile-russia/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2024.