Russia is already well on the way to meeting its emissions reduction goal amid an economic slowdown
ST PETERSBURG, Russia, April 2 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Russia's offer to reduce emissions as part of a new global climate change agreement due to be agreed in December is not ambitious enough as it will require little additional effort, experts have said.
Russia submitted its climate action plan to the United Nations late Tuesday, joining other big emitters ahead of a soft end-of-March deadline, pledging to cut its emissions by 25-30 percent by 2030 from 1990 levels.
With Russia's submission, 32 developed countries, covering nearly 80 percent of total emissions from industrialised nations, had delivered their contributions to the Paris agreement, the U.N. climate change secretariat said.
Russia's offer of limiting greenhouse gases to 70-75 percent of 1990 levels by the year 2030 "might be a long-term indicator, subject to the maximum possible account of absorbing capacity of forests”, its submission said.
Officials have yet to clarify what that means in practical terms, but it suggests that Russia wants to count the carbon sucked from the atmosphere by its forests towards meeting the target.
The emissions reduction figures had already been announced by Russian presidential envoy Alexander Bedritsky at a U.N. climate summit in New York City last September.
Experts argue that the current pledge is not ambitious enough, because Russia’s emissions are already around 30 percent lower than in 1990.
"A minus 25-30 percent target including forest sequestration requires almost nothing from Russia - no low-carbon development, no departure from the path of a resource-based economy," said Anton Galenovich, executive secretary of a working group to establish a carbon regulation scheme in Russia, set up by the Ministry for Economic Development and "Delovaya Rossia", an association of small and medium-sized businesses.
Alexey Kokorin of green group WWF Russia described Russia's plan as "too conservative", saying it "can and should do significantly more".
"It should reconsider its climate plan as submitted to the U.N. when the current national economic crisis is past - (it) should agree to more ambitious mitigation targets for 2025 and 2030," he said.
The plan was also criticised for not covering adaptation to climate change impacts.
“This is a highly vulnerable country and will need a lot of national adaptation and resilience measures,” Samantha Smith, leader of WWF’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative, said in a statement.
The Russian government has recognised that its territory is warming faster than other parts of the world. A recent report from Roshydromet, Russia's meteorological agency, states that over the last 100 years, average temperatures in Russia rose by 1.3 degrees Celsius, compared with 0.8 degrees globally.
Since 1976, the average temperature in Russia has increased by 0.43 degrees every 10 years, fuelling a rise in climate-related hazards, such as droughts, forest and peat fires, floods and shrinking water resources, the report said.
A recently published report on human development in Russia, written by scientists from the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow State University, projected that global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius would cause economic losses amounting to 2 to 3 percent of Russia's GDP.
ECONOMIC WOES LOWER EMISSIONS
According to preliminary estimates from WWF Russia, Russia's greenhouse gas emissions in 2014 stayed the same or declined compared to 2013, as the country entered a period of economic slowdown, largely due to international sanctions over the Ukraine conflict and plummeting oil prices.
Igor Bashmakov, director of the Centre for Efficient Energy Use, told a conference in Moscow last week that, in the current economic climate, Russia's emissions are unlikely to grow faster than 2 percent per year between 2013 and 2030.
WWF's Kokorin said Russia will reach its emissions peak around 2020, consistent with other countries with similar gross national income per capita.
According to Russia’s U.N. climate plan, its emissions have been decoupled from economic growth since the year 2000. While gross domestic product grew 72.9 percent from 2000 to 2012, greenhouse gas emissions increased by only 11.8 percent during the same period, it said.
WWF Russia estimates that the carbon intensity of Russia's economy has also dropped, from 1.2 kg of carbon dioxide emissions per $1 equivalent of GDP to 0.74 kg per $1 between 2000 and 2013.
Experts say Russia has reduced emissions significantly because of an economic slump in the 1990s and a shift in its economic structure in the 2000s from a focus on manufacturing and processing to extractive industries and services.
The country also has legally binding instruments aimed at cutting emissions. These include an energy efficiency law, which aims to decrease the energy intensity of GDP 40 percent by 2020, and a law setting a domestic emissions reduction target of 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.
One complicating factor is that state support for energy efficiency programmes and emission reductions is being withdrawn due budget cuts amid the country's economic woes.
Last week, it was revealed that the national plan for reducing emissions reductions to 2020, drawn up in May 2014, will be reconsidered.
Schemes to introduce obligatory carbon reporting for large companies and to work out indicators for emission reductions in various economic sectors have been postponed for a year, and all state subsidies have been cancelled. Ministries will now be required to come up with new measures to cut emissions that do not need public money.
(Reporting by Angelina Davydova, editing by Megan Rowling)
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