Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for Relations with International Organizations to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals Boris Titov. INTERVIEW | How Russia is Creating a Green Economy Climate and Environment
Russia is doing very serious work to assess harmful emissions and meet the goals set by the Paris Agreement on climate change. The country is also implementing many “green” projects and measures to adapt to global warming. This was stated in an interview with the UN News Service on the sidelines of the UN Climate Conference in Baku by Boris Titov, Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for Liaison with International Organizations to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals.
BT: Russia as a whole fully supports the Paris Agreement, the decisions that are being made. It is actively working within the framework of the discussion of all problems related to climate change. Therefore, we have taken on obligations, NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions – editor’s note), they should be reviewed next year.
But I think that we will be very active anyway. As far as I can see, the work of our scientists, the work of our economic departments, environmental departments, very large, serious work is underway to assess both emissions and, at the same time, the absorption of CO2. That is, a lot of work is being done at the national level, but within the framework of the tasks that are set in general by the Paris Agreement.
At the same time, of course, many questions arise. I think that many countries have many questions. Today there is the question of a fair transition, it is already being raised by many countries, there is inequality today, there are even barriers that European countries are putting up – a carbon tax on imports. We in Russia believe that this is a completely unfair decision, that the spirit of the UN, the spirit of the Paris Agreement is not being implemented here in many ways.
Today, many questions are being asked about the historical footprint, because, of course, developing countries have the right to ask this question, because what was before and the emissions that were made by large industrial countries, which today are seriously making efforts to make their economies greener. Nevertheless, for many hundreds of years they emitted CO2 and left a serious historical footprint on the Earth’s climate.
And, of course, it would also be wrong not to take this into account. In addition, of course, we hope that the decisions that have already been made at COP-29, thanks to the efforts of the Azerbaijani side, the hosts of COP-29, on carbon markets, will seriously move the process forward, because nothing has happened for many years.
Separate or country, national, or regional, as in the EU, carbon markets were created, but they are fenced in by “high fences” and therefore are not in the spirit of the UN what we talked about, what we planned. Because we believe that carbon markets should be global in nature. This is also the topic that we will be working on.
At the same time, we are working on the agenda of the SDGs, that is, the Sustainable Development Goals, and climate, and regulation of requirements for business not only on the UN platform, but also on the platforms of countries closer in spirit, such as the SCO platform, the BRICS platform. We are also developing our own standards and approaches there in all three of these areas.
UN News Service: As for domestic policy, how are you changing your economy towards sustainability?
BT:We measure ourselves against the SDGs, against all 17 of them. Unfortunately, the UN has not yet developed a unified approach to assessing the implementation of the SDGs; there are several such semi-formal ratings. Some rank us higher in terms of fulfillment of all these Sustainable Development Goals; somewhere we are in the middle of the list of countries, slightly ahead of the USA, however.
But at the national level, we are constantly working. We have regional ratings for the SDGs, and several of them – formal, official, and private ratings. We have 5 ratings in Russia that assess regions from the point of view of fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals.
We have a whole set of requirements for green projects. We are implementing the Sakhalin experiment. This is so far a mini-prototype of the carbon market in Russia, for Russia and, perhaps, for other countries. We issue carbon units, we set emission quotas. We have both validators and verifiers in the country. We have a registry of carbon units.
That is, we are moving forward on the entire agenda. At the same time, we believe that the national agenda is very good. We must move.
By the way, I would like to note one more thing: we are moving forward on adaptation much faster than other countries, because we believe that this problem is unfairly not receiving enough attention in the world. Guterres just spoke about this at COP-29, that no matter how much we would like to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in fact, the temperature is still rising and the climate is changing. And therefore, we must be ready for these changes.
That is why in Russia, for example, today – in addition to the fact that there is state monitoring of climate change – such monitoring and a forecast base are being created at the level of individual corporate banks. Sberbank is currently creating a climate risk assessment system that can be used by the entire country to understand what will change, what will melt or, conversely, freeze, and how both the population and businesses can prepare for these changes. We will have such a system in the near future.
Naturally, we have alerts about natural disasters. Today, all of our regions have created their own adaptation programs: what needs to be done to adapt to climate change. At the federal level, this work is all coordinated, and most likely, several programs will be adopted in the near future regarding what needs to be done first.