Experts assess the role of Russian forests in carbon regulation

Photo by: MikhailZykov / iStock

The report “Transboundary carbon regulation and Russia’s forests: from expectations and myths to the realisation of interests” was produced by climate and natural science experts Evgeny Schwartz, Andrey Ptichnikov, Alexey Kokorin and Alexander Krenke. They tried to assess the potential and role of Russia’s forests in climate conservation.

For example, at the end of 2020, the EU, Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the USA declared their intention to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Argentina, Brazil, China, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia, South Korea and a number of other major developing countries plan to achieve the same result by 2060.

The aim is mainly to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases — primarily CO2 from fossil fuels. Absorption of carbon from the atmosphere by forests (only managed forests) or other terrestrial ecosystems is also expected to play an important role. The authors of the report see risks in the illusion that if the role of forests in Russia is taken into account and increased, the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions will take a back seat to both environmental policy and big companies.

FZ-296 on Limiting Greenhouse Gas Emissions, which was adopted on 1 June 2021, provides the opportunity to implement national climate projects according to both international and national standards. These are also projects under Russia’s prospective emission reduction trading system. An example is the Kyoto Forest Climate Project (in the Bikin River valley in Primorskiy Kray), which successfully traded carbon units. They were owned by a local forest tenant, the Tiger Udege community, and bought by a British organisation.

The authors of the report believe that such international projects are not important for Russia yet, and advocate the development of a national system of trading quotas, which is already happening.

Thus, on 1 September 2022, the Register of Carbon Units of the Russian Federation was launched. On September 26, OOO DalEnergoInvest already sold 20 units at 1,000 rubles each. The company is reducing emissions by replacing conventional power generation on Iturup Island with solar.

As for the cross-border carbon regulation (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, CBAM) itself, it is difficult to judge in the current reality. The report’s authors argue about exports with EU countries, which are currently complicated. They point out that the Russian union of industrialists and entrepreneurs opposes a carbon tax on the entire volume of production because many companies would find it cheaper to pay a carbon tax only on products exported to the EU or other low carbon markets. Environmentally, the problem is that a carbon tax would reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than a carbon tax on exports only.

The report also compares the carbon balance of Russia’s and Canada’s forests, as they are similar in terms of area, natural and climatic conditions and proportion of management. The UNFCC reports that 72% of all forests (to 20 January 2021) in Russia and 65% of forests in Canada are classified as ‘unmanaged forests’. After analysing the data from the two countries, the report concludes that there are different ways of managing forests in terms of climate policy. Thus, in Russia, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment is focused on increasing the official assessment of greenhouse gas absorption by forests on the basis of new methodologies for accounting for the absorption capacity of forests and on using such assessments in climate decarbonization projects. Canada, on the other hand, is largely focused on improving forest management rather than increasing its forest carbon potential.

It should be noted that the Russian government plans to increase investments in greenhouse gas emission reduction to 1% of GDP in 2022–2030 and to 1.5–2% of GDP in 2031-2050.

Decarbonisation measures include support for low- and no-carbon technologies, incentives for the use of secondary energy resources, changes in tax, customs and budget policies, development of green finance, measures to preserve and increase the absorption capacity of forests and other ecosystems, and support for greenhouse gas capture, use and recycling technologies.

Cover photo: Anton Litvintsev / iStock