A year after the start of the war in Ukraine, many links between Russia and the rest of the world have broken down. In terms of climate and the environment, official relations are resisting tensions, but are no longer bathed in good humor.
Sunday, February 27, 2022. “Let me apologize on behalf of all Russians who have not been able to prevent this conflict”, breathes Oleg Anisimov, the head of the Russian delegation, in a meeting of the UN on the climate. For a moment, unease is expressed. Still, Mr. Anisimov’s specialties — climate change and the Arctic — would now be discussed through a new iron curtain.
In June, during climate talks in Bonn, Germany, Russian consul Alexey Dronov blamed Ukraine for undermining the spirit of cooperation by peddling “baseless” accusations against Moscow. Several delegations left the room in protest. According to Mr. Dronov, geopolitics has no place in climate forums; Russia therefore has no intention of withdrawing from it.
Despite its reputation as a fossil fuel giant, Russia has been undergoing a certain climate shift in recent years. In 2021, it adopted its first greenhouse gas reduction law. Vladimir Putin’s regime still hopes to zero the country’s carbon emissions by 2060.
Never mind the war in Ukraine: Russia remains a member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. It therefore took part in the major conferences of 2022, namely COP27 on the climate in Sharm el-Sheikh and COP15 on biodiversity in Montreal, and signed the agreements obtained.
“Russia was unusually discreet in these conferences,” observes Caroline Brouillette, acting director general of Climate Action Network Canada, who attended the two major meetings. Aware of its “isolation”, the great Slavic country has made itself “a little less visible in the space of negotiations”, underlines Mme Scramble, perhaps to avoid being permanently sidelined on the international scene.
In Egypt, where Russia did not have a flag (unlike Ukraine), the Russian delegation organized a panel discussion. We talked about permafrost, poplars that gorge themselves on carbon, but above all nuclear power plants, which the Russian agency Rosatom – a consortium of more than 300 companies and organizations – is trying to sell to developing countries to replace coal-fired ones.
In Montreal, the Russian delegation made little headlines, except in one respect: it wanted to remove the reference to a “reactive” approach to gender equality in the global framework agreement on biodiversity. She failed, this detail finally appears in the agreement.
Beyond the immediate repercussions, the invasion of Ukraine poses a burning long-term question: will the States of the world be able to collaborate on environmental matters despite the strained geopolitical context? In the opinion of M.me Scramble, it is quite possible: most countries are aware that these challenges cannot be met without cooperation.
“We had a great example of that in Montreal,” she says. The conference took place a few weeks after a peak of tensions between Canada and China, when Xi Jinping served remonstrations to Justin Trudeau in front of the camera. And yet, the two countries, which shared the organization of the summit, were able to put aside their differences to reach an agreement. »
A powder keg at the North Pole
A year of war in Ukraine, however, has undermined three decades of Arctic cooperation; the Arctic Council cut almost all ties with Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. And this, even if Moscow holds until next May the presidency of this international forum founded in 1996 in Ottawa to govern cooperation between the States of the Far North.
The absence of Russia around the table complicates scientific research in the Arctic, especially the numerous ones concerning the climate issue. The Far North acts as a “meteorological kitchen”, influencing the climate of the entire planet and serving as a barometer showing the extent of climate change on Earth.
Since 1979, warming has been occurring at a rate four times faster in the polar regions than on the rest of the globe, according to a study published in August in the journal Communications, Earth Environmenta chain of fame reviewed Nature.
Warming is also accelerating north of 66e parallel, since the last seven years there have also been the hottest of the last century. Without the participation of Russia, which owns 53% of the shoreline wetted by the Arctic Ocean, the climate watch of the Far North is at best fragmented, at worst interrupted until further notice.
The announced thaw in the Arctic Ocean could bring out new points of tension, in particular geopolitical, while many countries covet the sea routes of the Far North and the resources locked up under its ice.
The exploitation of Arctic resources, however, could experience a brake due to the Ukrainian invasion, notes Sanna Kopra, a researcher at the Arctic Center at the University of Lapland, Finland. “Western investors have deserted Russian energy projects, which risks complicating the fulfillment of its ambitions in the Far North,” explains the researcher. China, however, adds the researcher, could quickly fill the void created by the flight of Western capital. »
Isolated Russia
With the imminent accession of the From Sweden and Finland to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO’s border with Russia is about to double — nothing to warm the already frosty relationship between the West and Moscow. Their integration into the military alliance will break with a decades-old tradition of neutrality in these two Scandinavian countries. “It will be a watershed moment,” said the Arctic Institute, a Washington-based center for polar circle security studies, in a November report.
Russia will find itself more isolated than ever at the table of the Arctic Council, the only nation to shun NATO among seven other states, all members of the alliance. This Russian ban comes at a time when the militarization of the Arctic Circle that Gorbachev sought to avoid 35 years ago is increasingly confirmed.
Russia and China are already sharpening their weapons to project their power in the Arctic. Moscow has strengthened its military capacity to protect its 24,000 km long northern coast, while Beijing covets the new sea lanes of the Far North and builds its own icebreakers to have power over what the regime already designates as a “polar silk road”.
NATO, in parallel, is also flexing its muscles north of 66e parallel. Two weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine, the organization carried out large-scale military exercises in the Arctic as part of Cold Response training, deploying 30,000 soldiers from 27 countries, in addition to 20 aircraft and 50 ships.
In a famous speech delivered in Murmansk in 1987, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev dreamed that the North Pole would become a “pole of peace” between peoples. His utopia is also bruised by the bombs raining down on Ukraine: the Arctic is increasingly becoming this “arena where world powers compete” that former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saw in 2019.