Russia, the world’s second biggest gas producer, told the United Nations back in February that “natural gas as a transitional fuel… can be used for [emission-cutting] purposes” and this should be recognised at Cop28.

While the final Cop28 agreement does not specifically mention gas, it “recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security”.

It also calls on governments to transition away from fossil fuels in their energy systems so as to achieve net zero by 2050.

Diann Black-Layne from Antigua and Barbuda told the closing meeting of Cop28 that the “transitional fuel” language “is a dangerous loophole”. Coal, oil and gas are all fossil fuels and “we need to transition away from them,” she said.

But Barbados’s climate envoy Avinash Persaud later told Climate Home: “If you actually think about transitioning grids, transition fuels would help to transition with the lowest emissions. You can’t flip a switch and so in the mean time half switch. The challenge is to make sure that the slip road doesn’t become a parking lot.”

Persaud said that “more than a few” countries had supported the language “at some level and at varying degrees”. Another negotiator agreed it “wasn’t just Russia”.

Last-minute addition

Ahead of Cop28, governments and other organisations told a UN panel what they wanted to do to put the world on track to meet its climate goals, in a process known as the global stocktake.

A team of technical experts summarised all the submissions in October. The head of UN climate change, Simon Stiell, called for a “course correction”.

The technical summary included a line which called on governments to “recognise role of natural gas as an efficient transitional fuel”.

At Cop28, a leaked recording heard by Climate Home News shows a Russian negotiator said that ” we suggest emphasising the role of fuels with low-carbon footprint in particular natural gas – that’s transitional fuels and that enables efficient greenhouse gas reductions”.

The UAE Presidency put together an initial 27-page document which included the language which made it into the final text, dropping the mention of gas but referring to “transitional fuels”.

Like many other parts of this document, it included an alternative option of no text. Three days later, after talking to governments, the UAE Presidency dropped it from their next version of the Dubai deal.

With all the attention on the broader issue of fossil fuel phase-out, this language was little noticed or commented on – either in the press or by negotiators.

It stayed off the radar until the scheduled end date for Cop28, 12 December. It appeared in a draft text, according to a source who saw the text, time-stamped 8pm that night.

But some negotiators didn’t see it until the text was published at 7am the following morning. Four hours later, the closing plenary meeting began and within minutes it had been approved.

‘An honest paragraph’

The strongest supporters of anti-fossil fuel language at Cop28 were developed nations, particularly the European Union, and small islands.

But on gas, developed countries did not want to resist, and small islands were still in a separate meeting room discussing the text when the decision was made.

Speaking to press shortly afterwards, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said the EU delegation had not had much time to discuss the text.

But, she said through a translator, “for me it is really an honest paragraph”. She said Germany and the EU have been accused of hypocrisy at previous Cops for continuing to use gas while asking other countries to move to renewables.

“We wanted to show that this does not happen from one day for another but it will happen slowly, slowly, slowly,” she said. Gas is “a bridge”, she said, and “every bridge has an end”.

Kaveh Guilanpour, from the Center for Climate and Clean Energy Solutions, said he’d rather the language had not been there “but in many ways its consistent with what lot of countries and regions are actually doing”.

The day before Cop28 closed, Brazil auctioned 193 oil and gas blocks. On the day it closed, the Italian export credit agency lent €400m ($436m) to a firm to supply Italy with gas. The day after, the board of a European public bank decided to keep lending to gas pipelines and power plants.

Small islands not there

The negotiating group for 39 small, developing island states (Aosis) was most likely to object to that language.

But, having seen the final text at 7am, when the plenary started they were still frantically discussing whether to support it or not.

As they entered the room with their comments on the text in hand, the room was already standing to applaud Cop28 president Sultan Al-Jaber’s announcement that it had been adopted.

Their lead negotiator Anne Rasmussen from Samoa took the microphone to say she “was a little confused about what happened”.

Delivering her prepared remarks, she said that because of the transitional fuels language – and other issues – that the “course correction has not been secured”.

“We have made incremental advancements over business as usual when what we really needed is an exponential step change,” she said.

To a standing ovation, she said the text includes a “litany of loopholes” for carbon capture and on the removal of fossil fuel subsidies.

This article was updated on 16/12/23 to include the leaked recording of the Russian negotiator

The post How Russia won a ‘dangerous loophole’ for fossil gas at Cop28 appeared first on Climate Home News.

During a meeting of the bank’s steering committee in Marrakech, Morocco, they voiced opposition to reforms which are expected to channel more money into clean energy projects.

Mohammed Aljadaan, the Saudi finance minister, said “hydrocarbons will continue to play an important role in balancing the energy mix for the foreseeable future”, calling on the World Bank to reflect “these realities” in its financing.

He added that the lender should prioritise supporting universal electricity access, which requires “tapping all energy sources”.

His calls were echoed by Bahrain’s finance minister, Sheikh Salman Al Khalifa, who intervened at the meeting on behalf of a group of countries including neighbouring United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

“All sources of energy are essential and needed for economic growth and development,” he said before going on to make the case for the “indispensable role” of fossil gas as a source of “reliable and affordable” energy during the transition process.

Gulf states are among the world’s biggest producers and exporters of fossil fuels, which contribute to the vast majority of their national incomes.

Carbon capture pitch

Both Aljadaan and Al Khalifa also urged the World Bank to boost investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS) to allow for “a wide and reliable energy mix”. Saudi Arabia is a major proponent of CCS and has a history of promoting it in international summits, including talks over the IPCC scientific reports and UN climate talks.

Countries that produce or rely on fossil fuels particularly advocate the use CCS to trap their emissions, rather than ending the use of such fuels completely. However, the technology remains expensive and unproven at large scale.

According to the IPCC’s scientists, stopping a tonne of carbon dioxide with CCS costs between $50 and $200. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables usually saves money.

The International Energy Agency recently downgraded the role of the techno-fix in its net zero scenario, saying the history of CCS “has largely been one of unmet expectations”, marked by slow progress and flat deployment.

Green agenda attacked

Another voice in favour of fossil fuels around the World Bank committee table was that of Alexey Overchuk, Russia’s deputy prime minister. In a not-so-thinly veiled attack on the lender’s new agenda, he hit out at “unbalanced” energy and climate policies.

“An accelerated ‘greening’ of the global economy without considering the social effects and economic efficiency of decarbonization measures, along with massive underinvestment in fossil fuels, undermines energy security globally,” Overchuk said.

He added that the World Bank should recognise “the potential advantages of other energy sources, including gas and nuclear”. Russia is the second world’s largest gas producer, accounting for 18% of the global gas output in 2021.

World Bank and fossil fuels

The World Bank has reduced its financial backing of fossil fuel projects over the last few years. But last year it still provided over $1 billion of direct support to oil and gas, according to research by campaigning group Oil Change International.

A separate study found the lender’s private finance arm supplied $3.7bn in trade finance to oil and gas projects in 2022. Trade finance refers to a complex set of financial instruments in which money flows through intermediaries, like commercial banks, before reaching governments and businesses.

The World Bank – along its fellow development banks – recently agreed on principles to align its activities to the goals of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2°C and to “pursue efforts” to keep it under 1.5°C.

But analysts raised concerns over the framework which does not explicitly prohibit financing for fossil fuel activities.

Climate finance leader

The World Bank says it is the largest provider of climate finance to developing countries. In 2022, it delivered $31.7 billion for climate-related investments – 36% of its lending.

At the meeting on Thursday in Marrakech, the World Bank’s shareholders endorsed its new vision, which puts a sharper focus on climate change.

The bank has expanded its historical objective to “end poverty” by adding that this should happen “on a livable planet”.

The reason for evolving the statement is to widen the aperture through which the bank looks at its task in the future, its chief Ajay Banga said on Wednesday. “If you can’t breathe and cannot drink clean water, there is little point in eradicating poverty,” he added.

The post Saudi Arabia, Russia urge World Bank to keep funding fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

The label is equivalent to a ban on the group’s activities in Russia.

On Wednesday, the prosecutor-general had accused WWF-Russia of presenting “security threats in the economic sphere”. It said WWF had waged “tendentious” campaigns against the energy, oil and natural gas industries, which it said were aimed at “shackling” Russia’s economic development.

WWF-Russia had already been labelled a “foreign agent”, a designation that carries connotations of spying. The tag has been applied widely to civil society groups, with the effect of further crushing citizen-led activism, already under broad pressure from authorities.

WWF International said its Russian branch had operated as a “non-partisan national organisation, fully governed and managed by Russian citizens working towards the preservation of the biological diversity of the planet”.

WWF began working in Russia in 1989 and has been involved in major projects to protect endangered species such as Siberian (Amur) tigers, polar bears and European bison.

The organisation said it regretted being accused of posing a security threat, and that “conservation of our natural world is vital, particularly as the climate and biodiversity crises accelerate around the world”.

WWF’s fellow environmental group Greenpeace was banned in Russia last month. WWF Russia said it would no longer use the WWF acronym or panda logo.

The post As Moscow labels WWF “undesirable”, WWF Russia cuts ties with group appeared first on Climate Home News.

Speaking at a meeting of the World Bank’s steering committee, Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan urged the World Bank to “take on a prominent role in promoting CCUS [carbon capture utilisation and storage]”.

At the same meeting in Washington DC, Russia’s deputy prime minister Alexey Overchuk said CCUS was “of utmost importance to the green agenda”.

The technology is meant to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, usually from a particularly polluting source like a fossil fuel power station’s smokestack, and either use it or put it back in the ground. But it remains very expensive and largely unproven at scale.

Brownen Tucker from the campaigning group Oil Change International said more World Bank support for carbon capture and storage would be “beyond ridiculous”.

“The World Bank prioritising carbon capture and storage would just be a way to greenwash its long-time role as a piggy bank for the fossil fuel industry,” she told Climate Home.

Saudi’s CCUS pitch

At this week’s spring meeting of the World Bank, Al-Jadaan said the bank’s support for CCUS has been “insignificant” so far.

He added that the technology has “great potential to serve the climate mitigation agenda while contributing to affordable universal energy access”.

At the World Bank Group Development Committee meeting in Washington DC, I stressed the importance of continuing the Group’s commitment to ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity and the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.#WorldBank #SpringMeetings

— محمد عبدالله عبدالعزيز الجدعان | Mohammed Aljadaan (@MAAljadaan) April 12, 2023

Saudi Arabia is a major proponent of CCUS and has a history of promoting it in international summits, including talks over the IPCC scientific reports and UN climate talks.

‘Costly distraction’

Carbon capture and storage remains expensive and unproven at large scale.

According to the IPCC’s scientists, stopping a tonne of carbon dioxide with CCUS costs between $50 and $200. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables usually saves money.

There are currently only 35 commercial facilities applying CCUS with a total annual capture capacity of 45 Mt CO2, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Most are in North America and in the gas processing industry.

Many climate campaigners have called it a “distraction” that gives fossil fuel companies a licence to keep extracting more climate-harming coal, oil and gas.

But the IEA’s head Fatih Birol disagrees, calling it “critical for ensuring our transitions to clean energy are secure and sustainable”.

‘Absolutely essential’

In its current climate change action plan, the World Bank says CCUS “may be an important lever for decarbonization”.

In 2009 the World Bank set up a dedicated trust fund looking to support developing countries exploring CCUS potential.

Supported by the UK and Norwegian governments, the fund has provided grants worth a few million dollars.

It has supported technical assistance for the development of technology in Mexico, South Africa, Botswana, and, most recently, Nigeria.

Developing countries call for new government funds for World Bank

Speaking at a seminar last year, World Bank specialist Natalia Kulichenko said the trust fund would be closed in December 2023.

But she added the support was “absolutely essential to continue” in other forms, as the World Bank had been receiving more interest on CCUS from developing countries.

Kulichenko talked about the possibility of providing loans to governments and guarantees to the private sector as part of existing programs.

Russian backing

Alongside CCUS, Russia’s Overchuk listed gas, nuclear energy and measures to reduce the burning of gas as a by-product of pumping it up, known as flaring, as important green projects.

Russia is the second world’s largest gas producer, accounting for 18% of the world’s gas output in 2021.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, countries, especially in the European Union, have dramatically cut imports of Russian gas.

A gas field in the Yamal Peninsula in Russia. Photo: Russian Government

Russia is also the eighth biggest shareholder of the World Bank, where voting rights are linked to financial contributions.

The World Bank has provided over $1.5 billion in support for gas projects since 2020, according to an analysis from the campaigning group Oil Change International.

Gas commitments

In 2017, the bank said it would end its financial support for oil and gas extraction within the following two years.

But at Cop26 in Glasgow, it did not join five fellow development banks and 20 countries in signing up to a commitment to halt any new financing for oil and gas projects internationally by the end of 2022.

Green hydrogen rush risks energy ‘cannibalisation’ in Africa, analysts say

Russian Deputy prime minister Overchuk also urged the international community, including the World Bank, to find a common solution to ensure energy access and tackle poverty in Africa.

“Developing natural gas projects in African countries, abundant with natural gas, is a part of this solution,” he said. Several African leaders have said the same, criticising the West for stopping gas finance.

Overchuk opposed “additional reiteration and redistribution of resources” towards tackling climate change. Those efforts, he believes, are already well funded by the World Bank.

World Bank’s private sector arm to stop supporting new coal

The World Bank has committed to aligning all its operations with the Paris Agreement by July 2023.

However, the draft methodology to be used for this process indicates that some support for Paris-unaligned oil and gas projects will continue, according to the National Resources Defence Council.

The lender claims to be the world’s largest provider of climate finance to developing countries. It says in 2022 it delivered $31.7 billion for climate-related investments, taking up 36% of its overall lending.

The post Saudi Arabia, Russia push for more World Bank money into carbon capture appeared first on Climate Home News.

Tuesday’s deal is part of a wider €300 billion ($300bn) plan tabled by the European Commission in May to speed up the energy transition in the wake of Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine.

“Today we achieved a major step forward in strengthening Europe’s autonomy from Russia’s fossil fuels,” said Zbyněk Stanjura, the finance minister of the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating EU presidency.

“Given the geopolitical context since Russia started its military aggression against Ukraine, and given the latest attacks on energy infrastructure in Europe, I am sure it is necessary to push for a fast agreement on this proposal,” he added.

The proposal will add a new energy chapter to the national recovery plans approved by the European Union to restart the economy in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis two years ago.

But how to fund this spending without compromising other green objectives is hotly debated between the EU’s institutions and has yet to be decided.

Carbon price kept high

The European Commission originally suggested releasing carbon credits from the market stability reserve. This reserve was established in 2015 to keep the carbon price high to incentivise emissions reductions.

But EU countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark, were opposed to the idea, said Agnese Ruggiero from Carbon Market Watch, a green NGO. And in the European Parliament, all the main political groups are also fiercely against.

With its proposal, the European Commission probably tried killing two birds with one stone by raising funds and addressing calls from eastern EU countries to tackle high prices on the carbon market, Ruggiero said.

But the proposal risked causing a negative spiral as releasing more allowances would depress prices on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), requiring more allowances to be released to hit the €20 billion ($20bn), she explained.

Experts also criticised the Commission’s plan, saying it would undermine trust in the ETS at a time when the EU needs a high carbon price to sustain the bloc’s more ambitious decarbonisation targets for 2030.

EU countries set for clash with Parliament

Instead, EU ministers backed a combination of funds, including drawing 75% of the €20 billion ($20bn) from the Innovation Fund and 25% from the early sale of carbon allowances (frontloading).

Although more allowances would be sold in the short term, there would be no new CO2 allowances added to the ETS, raising pressure on EU countries to accelerate emissions reductions in the second half of the decade to hit the bloc’s 2030 goal.

But the European Parliament rejected the idea of using the Innovation Fund and would rather draw the €20 billion from the regular pool of emission allowances.

“We strongly disagree to have the main bulk of the money from the innovation fund because we need the fund to support the transition of the industry,” said Peter Liese, a German MEP who is the lead negotiator on the ETS reform in the European Parliament.

“This is completely unacceptable for us. And we will fight hard against this proposal” during final talks with EU member states, he added, saying member states like France and Netherlands were on the Parliament’s side.

Using the Innovation Fund

Last week, Liese presented a common position on the issue with the Parliament’s four biggest political groups – the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), the left-wing Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the centrist Renew Europe (RE) and the Greens.

Despite the Parliament’s concerns, Federico Sibaja from think-tank Sandbag said drawing money from the Innovation Fund also brings benefits.

“Those resources would be better spent than the way they’re being spent right now as the projects from the Innovation Fund are really focused on innovative technologies that may actually not be deployed in the next years to come. While actually the money from the recovery funds will be spent for mitigation strategies right away,” he explained.

The scope of the Innovation Fund should also be addressed in wider discussions about reforming the carbon market, he added.

However, it is not yet clear whether the negotiations will take place as part of the wider carbon market reform, which would allow trade-offs in negotiations within the topic, or if it will be tackled in separate negotiations.

The European Parliament is expected to vote on its position in November. It will then negotiate the plan with EU countries.

If adopted, the Parliament’s “frontloading” proposal would leave EU countries with fewer allowances until the end of the decade, which means pressure to decarbonise “will be even higher” as the EU gets closer to 2030, Liese said.

“That’s why member states are not so happy,” he added.

The European Commission hopes to have the proposal adopted by early next year.

This article was originally published on Euractiv and has been lightly edited for clarity.

The post EU ministers back €20 billion plan to ditch Russian fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

Government officials are compiling a database, using open source information and satellite images, of environmental damages in the wake of Russian attacks.

They intend to prosecute the Kremlin under international law and seek reparations.

“Russia has to pay for all that they have done,” Iryna Stavchuk, Ukraine’s deputy minister for energy and environment, told Climate Home News. “The ultimate goal is that they actually pay for the recovery.” 

Stavchuk is leading efforts to document the toll of the war on natural resources and ecosystems, in partnership with international and Ukrainian organisations.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, the State Ecological Inspectorate of Ukraine has recorded 231 cases of environmental damage.

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“There is a lot of local chemical and hazardous pollution on the ground from all the missile attacks and bombings,” said Stavchuk.

Inspectors are travelling to sites struck by Russian missiles and bombs to collect soil samples and to monitor pollution levels, where it is safe to do so. They do not have access to some of the hardest hit areas.

Crimes related to environmental damage have rarely been prosecuted under international law, giving Ukraine few precedents to build on. One exception is a case brought by Kuwait against Iraq, for its invasion and occupation of the country in 1990-91.

Fires in Chernihiv, Ukraine, including at a warehouse and facility storing fuel products, on 21 March 2022. (Credit: Maxar)

When the Gulf War ended, the UN created a compensation commission to deal with Kuwaiti claims arising from Iraq’s invasion. The commission found that Iraq was liable under international law for losses and damages, including environmental damages and the depletion of natural resources. Kuwait was awarded $52.4 billion in compensation for 1.5 million of the 2.7 million claims it brought. 

“The UN Security Council decided that they would proceed with that case,” said Stavchuk. “It’s actually a problematic case for us because Russia [sits] on the Security Council.”

She added: “We understand that we will have to come up with a completely new legal [framework] on environmental  crimes because most of the documents within the UN system were designed for peacetime.”

Environmental inspectors take samples following an explosion on the Samara-Western oil pipeline, in the village of Rudnya, Ukraine. (Photo: State Ecological Inspectorate Ukraine/Facebook)

Nonprofits are helping to gather evidence of the environmental impacts and the long-term risks they pose to Ukraine and other countries. 

The environmental damage caused by Russia’s invasion is extensive and already affecting people’s health and safety, Yevheniia Zasiadko, head of climate at the Ukrainian non-profit EcoAction, told Climate Home News.

EcoAction has been using reports on social media channels, such as Telegram, to monitor incidents across the country. “But it’s impossible to see the full picture,” said Zasiadko.

Incidents documented by EcoAction include Russian bombing of oil depots, which increased air pollution over residential areas in Kyiv, explosions around pipelines, which caused oil spills and contaminated water sources, and a Russian strike against a nitrogen tank which dispersed four tonnes of nitric acid, she said.

There have also been attacks around nuclear reactors, sparking forest wildfires and posing a serious risk to surrounding areas of radioactive release.

Philippines inquiry finds polluters liable for rights violations, urging litigation

On 2 March Russian shelling hit the largest poultry farm in Europe, Chornobayevskaya, killing almost five million chickens. “It is unrealistic to dispose of them,” said Zasiadko, raising serious concerns about bacterial contamination. 

Pax, a peace organisation based in the Netherlands, has been using satellite images to verify locations and incidents mentioned on social media channels. The organisation started monitoring the environmental damages caused by conflict during the Syrian War.

“In Ukraine, we want to document that there are direct risks for civilians from environmental damage, in particular in urban areas and around industrial sites,” Wim Zwijnenburg, who is leading the work at Pax, told Climate Home News. 

A fire at a fuel tanker farm in Kalynivka, Ukraine, after it was hit by Russian cruise missiles on 25 March 2022. (Credit: Maxar)

Russia has targeted industrial waste facilities, which has led to wastewater leaking into rivers and lakes, creating a public health risk and preventing civilians from accessing clean drinking water, said Zwijnenburg. When Russian missiles struck a fuel tanker farm in Kalynivka, a farming village 40km south of Kyiv, it sparked a big fire which increased air pollution for communities living downwind.

“Oil and wastewater could pose additional risks to local surface and groundwater if it gets out of the facility,” said Zwijnenburg. 

The database also helps Ukrainian authorities prioritise their emergency response to incidents and, once the conflict ends, to direct rehabilitation and clean-up efforts, he said.

The post Ukraine builds legal case against Russia for environmental damage appeared first on Climate Home News.

Russia supplies 40% of EU gas and 26% of its oil imports.

“Today we will propose to ban all Russian oil from Europe,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in the European Parliament on Wednesday.  “This will not be easy,” she added.

“We will make sure that we phase out Russian oil in an orderly fashion, in a way that allows us and our partners to secure alternative supply routes and minimises the impact on global markets… Thus, we maximise pressure on Russia, while at the same time minimising collateral damage to us and our partners around the globe.”

EU member states have been wary of imposing an embargo on Russian oil and gas but Germany indicated earlier this week it was ready to back an EU ban and said it would weather short-term price hikes and fuel shortages.

The re-election of Emmanuel Macron as French president last week helped tip the balance in favour of a tough EU-wide stance.

Germany to build LNG terminals at ‘Tesla speed’ in shift away from Russian gas

In retaliation, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Tuesday enabling him to terminate exports and deals on his own terms.

Russia has benefited in the short term from disruption to the coal, oil and gas markets triggered by its invasion of Ukraine, with soaring prices outweighing the effect of international sanctions. Energy and Clean Air estimates the EU has paid €52.5 billion ($55.3bn) to Russia for fossil fuels since 24 January.

To unite the 27-nation bloc, the Commission is expected to offer Hungary and Slovakia exemptions on the embargo. Both countries are heavily reliant on Russian oil, with Hungary importing 60% of its oil from Russia and Slovakia almost 100%, Genady Kondarev, a senior analyst at E3G for central and eastern Europe, told Climate Home News.

Even without their support, the proposed embargo will “shrink the Russian oil market in the EU 14 times,” Kondarev told Climate Home News.

“The embargo may come into force without Slovakia and Hungary being in it. It will still have a severe bite and there will be no risk for the economies of the two EU countries,” Kondarev said.

“This embargo is an important political signal which shows that the EU is following through with what was only a threat a few days back,” independent energy analyst Poppy Kalesi told Climate Home News.

“Civil society in the EU is already pressing for gas to follow so an oil ban can be interpreted as strike one,” she said.

The embargo could accelerate efforts to design cars out of cities, which is already happening across Europe, Kalesi added.

The post EU plans to stop buying Russian crude oil in six months appeared first on Climate Home News.

“Making France a great green nation, that is our project,” Macron tweeted on the night of his victory, after he received 58.5% of the votes against 40.5% for Le Pen – a lower margin than in the 2017 election, when he got 66% of the votes. 

In the election campaign, Macron declared he would make France “the first major nation to abandon gas, oil and coal.”

While climate advocates are breathing a sigh of relief that Le Pen – who threatened to dismantle wind turbines – lost, Macron’s climate record to date has fallen short of the rhetoric.

Coming to power in 2017 on a promise to “make climate great again”, Macron inherited an underperforming state. France was successfully sued for failing to meet its 2015-18 emissions objectives and is is the only EU member state to have missed its 2020 renewable energy target.

After five years in power, the government remains off track to meet its 40% emissions reduction target by 2030 compared to 1990 levels – a goal which it will need to ramp up to align with the EU’s collective goal of at least 55% cuts.

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Macron has said he wants to accelerate the construction of offshore wind farms, develop nuclear power and a large-scale programme to retrofit homes and make them more energy-efficient. But the deployment of renewables and uptake of electric transport has been slow.

France has only built one offshore wind farm. Macron announced this year that France will build 50 offshore wind farms by 2050, with 40GW of capacity. 

France’s weak record on deploying renewables is largely due to administrative hurdles and court challenges, especially for wind farm projects, Nicolas Berghmans, Iddri’s lead European affairs and climate expert, told Climate Home News. The time required for the installation of a wind farm in France is around eight years – significantly higher than in other EU countries, he said.

In 2021, a French court awarded damages to a Belgian couple who claimed that a wind turbine near their house in southern France caused a range of negative health impacts, referred to as “wind syndrome”, including headaches, insomnia and depression. 

Construction has started on offshore wind farms “so we should continue to see an acceleration of renewable energy deployment in the coming years,” said Berghmans.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced many EU countries to reconsider their long-standing opposition to nuclear power as they seek to reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels. France has relied heavily on nuclear energy for decades. 

The country derives around 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy and is home to 56 nuclear power reactors. In February, the government announced plans to build six new reactors and to consider building a further eight. 

Campaigners are not convinced.

Any new nuclear energy project will be expensive and not come online until 2035, said Raphael Hanoteaux, a senior policy advisor on gas politics at E3G. “Solar, wind and storage are already cheaper than nuclear, and will be even cheaper in 12 to 15 years,” he told Climate Home News.

“French politicians are obsessed with the nuclear industry, which diverts attention from real solutions,” Neil Makaroff, EU policy officer at Climate Action Network France, told Climate Home News. “Not a euro of the [coronavirus] recovery plan has been dedicated to renewables. A bad signal.”

“The existing nuclear power plant fleet is quickly ageing, as its underperformance this winter clearly showed, and it is today unlikely that it will be replaced with new reactors with an equivalent generation capacity,” said Berghmans. “Renewable production will have to close this large gap.”

China’s coal miners face a challenge to capture leaked methane

If Macron is to achieve his goal of reducing France’s reliance on Russian fossil fuels, he should focus on transport and housing, Sebastien Treyer, executive director of the think tank Iddri, told Climate Home News.

Enabling access to electric mobility and ensuring large-scale energy efficiency in buildings should be priorities for Macron’s short-term climate strategy, he said.

Electric mobility is on the rise in France, but it is not growing as strongly as in other EU countries, such as the Netherlands and Norway, said Berghmans. This is partly due to delays in deploying charging infrastructure, as well as to insufficient incentives for the uptake of electric vehicles, he said. French citizens rely heavily on cars – with 75% using a car for their daily commute – and investments in cycling and public transport are lagging, he added. 

A carbon tax on fuel has been frozen since 2018, when a proposed hike triggered widespread protests and gave birth to the “gilets jaunes” movement.

“The shadow of yellow vests still looms large. It’s likely Macron’s new government will remain extremely cautious about reintegrating the carbon tax to its arsenal of measures,” Lola Vallejo, climate programme director at Iddri, told Climate Home News.

Pakistan’s tree-planting ambition in doubt after Imran Khan’s exit

The country’s citizens’ assembly has identified mandatory minimum energy performance standards for buildings as a key measure to force deep renovation of buildings but this measure has been watered down by the government, said Makaroff. 

“Renovation efforts are still timid considering the triple menace of climate change, the cost of living crisis, and the Russia-Ukraine war,” Vallejo said. 

“Public support for [this] is still insufficient and poorly targeted to the deep energy renovations that are needed to achieve climate targets,” said Berghmans. The government should offer more solutions and alternatives to poorer households, whose financial balances are directly impacted by rising fuel prices, he said.

The post Macron promises to abandon gas, oil and coal, but will he deliver? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Could this signal a break with Tokyo’s coal-friendly policies? That seems unlikely given its track record of using loopholes and greenwashing to circumvent global efforts to end coal. While other wealthy countries have slowly been transitioning away from coal, Japan has continued its support for coal power at home and abroad.

Japan is the second largest funder of coal power projects in other countries, after China. It justifies this funding by deceptively framing it as a contribution to climate change mitigation, arguing that Japanese coal technology is less polluting than conventional coal technology. The government therefore supports the export of Japanese “world-leading” coal power plants to developing countries. This policy is misleadingly described as “in line with the Paris Agreement and aimed at leading global decarbonization efforts”. 

Strong international pushback has led to some positive developments. The Japan Bank for International Cooperation announced in 2020 that it “will no longer accept loan applications for coal-fired power generation projects” and some Japanese-funded projects have been cancelled. Nonetheless, a recent study found that the world’s three biggest lenders to the coal industry were all Japanese banks. 

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In June of 2021, G7 countries promised to make efforts to end coal “as soon as possible” and end “almost” all direct government support for the fossil fuel energy sector overseas. According to someone involved in preparing the G7 statement, it was mainly on Japan’s insistence that such enervating qualifiers were inserted, weakening the message and enabling prolonged coal use.

Japan’s Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) has stated that Japan intends to keep its coal plants but will try to “decrease the [coal] share as much as possible”. However, an unnamed METI official told the Asahi newspaper that compromising on the coal share of Japan’s energy mix was “out of the question”. This means the government has no intention to improve its unambitious Basic Energy Plan, which aims at a 19% coal share in the 2030 electricity mix.

At the G20 meeting in Rome last October, countries resolved to end “public finance for new unabated coal power generation abroad”. On this occasion, Japan declared its intention “to end new direct government support” for such projects. The Japanese wording is important as it leaves the door open to continue backing overseas coal projects through the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). This is because JICA, due to its legal status as an independent administrative institution, is not technically a government agency even though it operates like one.

Last year’s Cop26 climate talks ended with the Glasgow Pact calling for a phasedown of unabated coal power and fossil fuel subsidies. Many participating countries signed the Global Coal to Clean Power Transition Declaration and a pledge to stop funding foreign fossil fuel projects. Japan signed neither.

Sweden set to be world’s first country to target consumption-based emission cuts

Japan’s new prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has been noncommittal on a coal phasedown. In his policy speeches and his Cop26 speech, he boasted about Japanese environmental leadership, but conspicuously avoided any mention of coal. His chief cabinet secretary, Hirokazu Matsuno, perfectly conveyed the government’s lack of ambition when he insisted that Japan’s plans are “in line” with the Cop26 agreement’s call for a phasedown of coal. 

The government pins its hopes on “clean coal” technologies like carbon capture and storage to mitigate the climate impact of coal, but the feasibility of these is highly doubtful. A recent report by Transition Zero concluded that these technologies “are high-cost with limited carbon-reduction potential in the electricity sector”. 

In short, Japan has consistently resorted to semantic acrobatics to extend the life of coal power. 

Japan’s unrelenting coal addiction not only threatens to undercut its “lofty goal” of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, it also risks locking other Asian countries onto a similar trajectory of coal dependence. 

As Japan now will begin banning Russian coal, it should not look for new coal partners, but rather use this moment as an opportunity to earnestly transition away from coal. It is high time for Tokyo to join global efforts to contain the climate crisis by reducing emissions in the electricity sector.

Florentine Koppenborg is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer and the Bavarian School of Public Policy (HfP) at the Technical University of Munich. Ulv Hanssen is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at Soka University and an associate research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

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A ministerial report obtained by Russian newspaper Kommersant said its plans to reduce national net emissions 80% between 1990 and 2050 would not now be achieved.

Ryan Wilson, Russia analyst with Climate Analytics, told Climate Home that this target is unambitious and relies mainly on accounting tricks rather than real emissions reductions and would largely be unaffected by sanctions.

Emissions reductions on 1990 levels are easier for Russia to achieve because the Russian economy, and therefore emissions, collapsed shortly after 1990. Russia’s long-term climate strategy plans for recorded emissions to continue to rise until 2030 before declining slowly.

Climate Action Tracker ranks Russia’s climate ambition and action as “critically insufficient”.

Of the emissions reductions which are planned, Wilson said “the vast majority come from very high projected removals from the forestry sector. These removals would not by affected by sanctions”.

Under Russia’s approved “intensive” emissions reduction scenario, between 2019 and 2030, increased “removals” would take away 0.66bn tons of Co2 a year while emisisons reductions would account for 0.29bn tons.

Russia plans to change how it counts emissions from forestry. Global guidelines on carbon accounting state that only emissions and emissions reductions from "managed forests", which are subject to human intervention, should be counted.

But Russia plans to categorise all its forests as "managed forests" and claim credit for the carbon they absorb as trees grow. Around 20% of the world's forest is in Russia.

Russian renewable investors have warned that, beacuse of sanctions, they are unlikely to build their projects as quickly as planned and have asked the Russian government not to fine them for the delay.

‘Betrayal’: US approves just $1bn climate finance for developing countries in 2022

Wilson said renewables projects may be delayed but "Russian renewable energy targets are very modest and were already not on track to be met".

One reason Russian renewables have been slow to develop is that rules require a lot of the equipment to be made in Russia, he said.

The revenues of Russian oil and gas companies are likely to be hurt by boycotts. The European Union plans to reduce its use of Russian gas by two-thirds in a year and stop using Russian fossil fuels by 2027.

In response to this falling income, the Russian government is reportedly considering lowering taxes on Russian fossil fuel firms, relaxing fuel standards and allowing them to sell alcohol at petrol stations.

This article was amended on 19/3/22 to express Russia's 2050 target using a 1990 baseline rather than a 2019 baseline. The 1990 baseline is more widely used by the Russian government. Context on that 1990 baseline was also added.

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Speaking from the environment ministry’s basement bomb shelter in Kyiv, Roman Shakhmatenko told the Nairobi-based meeting: “For decades, a lot of leaders… have been using limitless and unstoppable fossil fuels.”

“We’ve ignored the issue that it’s influencing climate change. We’ve ignored that it’s influencing our future, our global future,” he added.

“Moreover,” he said, “this ignorance brought [the] rise of mad, of crazy dictators with a lot of money to kill people and destroy [the] environment.”

He sighed deeply before continuing: “With this in mind, I urge you please take joint action [to] withdraw all of the assets, all of the shares from Russian fossil fuel companies… because they’re using this money to kill people.”

Ukraine’s deputy environment minister addressing the UN Environment Assembly.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, western oil and gas majors have announced plans to divest from Russian oil and gas interests. The strength of their commitments varies.

Shell and Equinor have said they will end their joint ventures with Gazprom, BP has said it will exit its 20% stake in Rosneft, ExxonMobil has started to wind down operations and exit its far-eastern Russian oil and gas field and Eni has said it intends to sell its 50% stake in a gas pipeline linking Russia to Turkey.

French major Total Energies has only said it will halt new investments, not ditch its 19% stake in Novatek, which includes development of LNG in the Arctic.

Shell, Equinor and BP are minority stakeholders so operations will continue without them. Exxon is the majority shareholder and operator of the Sakhalin 1 oil and gas field.

Asked whether this would disrupt Russian oil and gas production, the energy lead for Ukrainian environmental NGO Ecoaction Kostiantyn Krynytsky told Climate Home it was the “million dollar question”.

“I think it can work in a package,” he said, with sanctions on Russian assets. He added that just a minor reduction in production would not be enough though, as the current war was financed by “business as usual” after Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Ukrainian region of Crimea.

Under attack: the Ukrainian climate scientist fighting for survival

Western governments are also targetting Russian fossil fuels. In 2020, Europe imported around 175 billion cubic metres of gas a year from Gazprom, bankrolling the Russian state.

Yesterday, European Commission president Ursula Von Der Leyen said the EU was building new liquified natural gas terminals to import gas by ship from countries other than Russia. Europe’s biggest LNG suppliers in 2020 were Qatar, Nigeria, Russia and the USA.

In the long run, she said investment in renewables would make the EU “truly independent” because “every kilowatt-hour of electricity Europe generates from solar, wind, hydropower or biomass reduces our dependency on Russian gas and other energy sources” and that “means less money for the Kremlin’s war chest”.

Comment: An energy investment treaty has been holding Nord Stream 2 hostage

The Commission is hastily rewriting its gas security strategy to emphasise replacing Russian supplies from alternative sources. The draft proposal would also require member states to fill gas storage ahead of next winter and speed up permitting for new wind and solar farms.

A Bruegel analysis found it was possible for Europe to get off Russian gas without increasing coal or oil use.

In Europe, Russia’s biggest customer for gas is Germany. Berlin is drawing up plans to reduce the country’s use of Russian gas, mainly through green measures. Finance minister Christian Lindner has labelled renewables “freedom energy”.

In the short term, the German government plans to target LNG from non-Russian countries, roll out heat pumps and non-gas district heating and ramp up renewables. This will require training programmes for heat pump installers as well as cash for investment.

Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

It may also postpone closures of coal-fired power stations, with Green economy minister Robert Habeck saying energy security comes before climate action right now. But there is no indication that the government would abandon its plans to phase out coal-fired power by 2030.

Nuclear plant closures are unlikely to be postponed, Germanwatch analyst David Ryfisch told Climate Home, as the decommissioning process has started and there are doubts as to whether it can safely be reversed.

In the long term, Germany has brought forward its 100% renewable electricity target from “well before 2040” to 2035. It wants 80% renewables electricity by 2030.

While there is strong demand for gas from Asia, it would not be easy for Russia to reroute sales as its gas is mainly produced in western Siberia and linked to Europe by pipelines.

Operational gas pipelines are in brown. Russia’s gas fields are mainly in western Siberia.

On Wednesday, Russian oil was trading at a discount of more than $18 a barrel below the market rate, with buyers wary of reputational or legal risk.

The Center for Strategic and International (CSIS) energy researcher Ben Cahill said that Asia could not easily replace European markets for oil either. Around 60% of Russia’s oil exports go to OECD Europe while 20% go to China.

Cahill told the CSIS podcast: “It’s a significant exporter to both markets. It’s the critical supplier to Europe. So can they replace Europe as a customer for crude oil products? No they can’t”.

“This is the end of Russia as an energy superpower”, added Cahill’s colleague Nikos Tsafos.

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Increasingly frequent methane releases from venting, flaring or leakage along two major gas pipelines came despite an estimated 14% drop in exports to Europe.

Analysis firm Kayrros detected 13 methane emission events around the Yamal-Europe pipeline – a 4,196 km pipeline running through Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany – and a further 33 around the Brotherhood pipeline, 2,750-km long gas pipeline through Russia, Ukraine and Slovakia.

Operators told Kayrros these methane releases were related to planned maintenance and had been reported to the relevant authorities.

Analysts said a number of factors could have contributed to the spike in methane emissions over Russia, including a drop in oil and gas prices and a lack of maintenance of gas pipelines during the pandemic. 

“With oil prices slumping to historic lows in 2020, this places additional financial pressure on producers, potentially leading to reduced maintenance and repairs on equipment, and flare monitoring, all of which could lead to higher levels of venting,” Ryan Wilson, an energy policy analyst at Climate Analytics, told Climate Home News. 

UN suspends climate work with Myanmar government following military coup

Falling oil and gas prices often go hand in hand with an increase of flaring and venting, which involve burning methane or directly releasing the potent gas into the atmosphere, said Jonathan Banks, senior policy advisor at the US-based Clean Air Task Force. “We have seen this in south Texas.” 

Methane, which is released into the atmosphere from abandoned coal mines, farming and oil and gas operations, has a global warming impact 84 times higher than CO2 over a 20-year period. It accounts for 25% of global warming emissions from human activities, according to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in January that Russia is the world’s largest methane emitter. Last year the country produced 13,953 kt of methane emissions, almost 20% of the 70 Mt of methane released into the atmosphere worldwide last year. After Russia, the biggest emitters were the US, Iran and Turkmenistan. 

“We have no chance of meeting our climate targets or targets for decarbonisation if we don’t start to deal with methane emissions in countries that produce large amounts of oil and gas like Russia,” Banks told Climate Home News.

Methane emission hotspots detected by Kayrros along the Yamal-Europe and Brotherhood gas pipelines in Russia. (Image: Kayrros)

The oil and gas industry could achieve a 75% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 using existing technology, according to the IEA. 

In 2012, Russia started fining companies that flared more than 5% of gas they produced, according to Wilson. But there are no regulations in place to reduce leaks from natural gas compressors and pneumatic devices into the atmosphere, he said.

“Considering global reports and accounts of Russia’s performance though, such policies do not appear to be effective – the problem is only getting worse,” Poppy Kalesi, director of global energy at EDF, told Climate Home.

Japan, US exposed as UN chief urges G7 to commit to 2030 coal exit

As the world’s largest importer of gas, the EU plays a major role in influencing the climate policies of other countries. Analysts say that to date the EU has done little to pressure Russia to curb its methane emissions.

“What the European Commission proposes is to use soft power measures to raise awareness and secure a collaborative approach. And this is not enough,” said Kalesi. “The EU should in the very least agree on a minimum methane performance standards and taxes or levies on all EU gas buyers who fail to procure compliant gas.”

The EU Commission said last year that it was considering imposing binding methane emissions standards on oil and gas imports and introducing legislation requiring fossil fuel companies to report and repair methane leaks. 

Wilson said that the introduction of binding standards would “force Russia to ensure it is accurately quantifying its methane emissions and implement measures to meet such standards”.

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While the European Union is pushing for updates of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) to make it more climate-friendly, Japan has resisted any changes.

Ahead of a second round of negotiations on modernising the pact this week, Luxembourg’s energy minister Claude Turmes said in a webinar the EU might quit the treaty if there was no progress.

“I would not rule out that if nothing moves, if there is not sufficient movement, then you would have no other option than to collectively step out. That was also a discussion raised by France, although I can’t confirm the French government’s commitment,” he said.

Marjolaine Meynier-Millefert, a French lawmaker from president Emmanuel Macron’s party, said reform was preferable to ditching the treaty, but “if we are forced to do so then there would be no other option than to do so”.

On Tuesday, 139 lawmakers in the European Parliament issued a statement warning the treaty “is threatening the climate ambition of the EU domestically and internationally”. They said the EU should withdraw unless it can achieve a rewrite of the pact to scrap protections for fossil fuel investors.

Uniper uses investment treaty to fight Netherlands coal phaseout

The ECT is a pact signed in the 1990s to boost investment flows between western and post-Soviet countries. Provisions to deter states from grabbing private assets have been retooled by energy companies to fight climate policies.

Last year, German utility Uniper threatened to sue the Dutch government under the treaty, because a national plan to phase out coal burning would force the early closure of Uniper’s power station near Rotterdam.

The European Union has proposed amendments that reinforce governments’ “right to regulate” on issues like public health and the environment. But any changes must be passed unanimously and so can be blocked by any of the ECT’s 53 signatories.

A written submission from Japan published by the ECT secretariat in October 2019, before modernisation talks began, asserts 26 times: “Japan believes that it is not necessary to amend the current ECT provisions”.

Among the proposals rejected by Japan are language on the “right to regulate” and changes to the investor-state dispute resolution (ISDS) mechanism.

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Leaked ECT notes seen by Climate Home News show that, ahead of the first round of negotiations in July 2020, Japan expressed “great concerns” about an EU plan for a multilateral investment court to replace the ISDS.

Japan was supported in this by Kazakhstan. In the notes, both nations said “modernisation should be minimal”.

According to Yamina Saheb, a former head of the ECT energy efficiency unit and observer of the negotiations, the 12-strong Japanese delegation in July made no proposals to change the text and called for 2020 discussions to be limited to clarifying national positions.

Japan’s position as the largest single donor to the ECT and the vice chair of the modernisation negotiations means it is influential.

Pia Eberhardt, a researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory, told CHN Japan’s opposition means “it’s very unlikely that we will see any of the changes which we would need to see to make this agreement compatible with climate action”.

Countries promise green recovery at Japanese virtual summit, keep quiet on fossil bailouts

Japan’s reluctance to change the ISDS mechanism reflects the fact that, unlike many European countries, it has never been sued by foreign investors.

On the other hand, Japanese companies have used the ECT to take legal action against governments. So far, these have only been renewables companies angry at a decision by Spain’s previous government to cut subsidies and increase taxes – but fossil fuel companies could use the treaty in a similar way.

Japan is the only G7 country still building coal-fired power plants, both in Japan and overseas. According to Mission 2020, Japanese public finance is behind 24.7 GW of coal power in other countries. That is larger than Australia’s entire coal fleet.

These coal power plants are in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Chile and Morocco. None of these countries are signatories to the ECT but several are either in the process of acceding or are observers.

And in 2016, the Japanese government changed the law to allow its state-run JOGMEC agency to buy foreign energy assets.

Guterres tells India coal business ‘going up in smoke’ as investors back clean tech

Italy and Russia have left the ECT, although a ‘sunset clause’ means the treaty’s provisions apply for 20 years after they leave.

Russia withdrew from the treaty in 2009, when former shareholders of the Yukos energy company used the ISDS to claim compensation for assets they said had been expropriated by the Russian government.

Italy withdrew from the ECT in 2016. The government said this was to reduce costs associated with membership but it may also have been a response to renewable energy companies taking legal action over a reduction in solar power subsidies.

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As trillions of dollars pour into the global economy to mitigate the impacts of Covid-19, resounding calls have been made to governments and financial institutions to ensure longer term climate action is a condition for relief.

With carbon-intensive sectors lining up for economic support to protect the jobs of millions of people, calls are also intensifying for workers to benefit over corporations.

In a statement, G20 countries said they were injecting more than $5 trillion into the global economy to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic. The virus has killed more than 24,000 people worldwide.

In the US, the Senate unanimously passed a gigantic $2-trillion bill aimed at helping workers and industries impacted by the rapid economic slowdown. This includes a $500 billion fund to help hard-hit industries and more than $60 billion for airlines with some strings attached.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi praised Democrats’ efforts to “flip the bill over” from a “corporate trickle-down Republican version to bubble-up workers first, families first legislation” with conditions that money given to the airlines for example “are given to the workers directly”.

In Canada, academics, labour and environmental organisations have warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration that any bailout to the oil and gas sector should benefit the workers, not the corporations, and that the economic stimulus should be green.

In Europe, there are clear calls for any economic stimulus package to be consistent with the continent’s pledge to become climate-neutral by 2050 and pinned to the Green Deal framework.

While many agree the pandemic has opened a window to accelerate the transition to a green economy, the question of timing remains key.

As governments scramble to reinforce health services to save lives and put cash in the hands of hard-hit families and businesses, some analysts warn the immediate crisis will need to pass before investments can be directed to the clean energy transition. When and how this happens could determine climate action for years to come.

Eyes in the sky 

Scientists at Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii are monitoring the atmosphere for signs the economic slowdown linked to the coronavirus pandemic could reduce the rise in atmospheric carbon concentrations.

Alister Doyle spoke to Ralph Keeling, son of Charles Keeling, the founder of the Keeling Curve, which has been tracking increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere since 1958.

“There has never been an economic shock like this in the whole history of the curve,” he said.

This month, the data hints at a slight slowdown in the rate of CO2 rise. But the scientists will need more time to know whether this possible trend is linked to the pandemic.

‘Baby steps’ 

Russia has published draft plans to slightly toughen its 2030 climate targets that would still allow its emissions to rise in the next decade.

The UN is demanding countries make deep cuts to their greenhouse gas emissions in line with the scientific findings to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature goals.

But the world’s fifth biggest emitter projected its emissions would rise in coming years to 67% of its 1990 level by 2030 – a slight improvement on its current 75% target. Russia’s emissions plunged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and are still about half the levels they were in 1990.

Environmental NGOs have criticised the plan as inadequate in a time of climate crisis. “It’s only baby steps,” said Vladimir Chuprov, of Greenpeace in Moscow.

Electric drive 

Electric cars are a greener alternative to petrol and diesel vehicles in almost every part of the world.

Researchers have found that plug-in cars emit less greenhouse gas emissions over their lifetime than other vehicles, even when including the mining of metals for batteries, the manufacturing process and scraping.

This is true everywhere but in countries where the electricity used to recharge electric vehicles is generated from coal-fired power plants, the study found, noting blackspots in India, Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria.

This week’s top stories

• Coronavirus: in Hawaii’s air, scientists seek signs of economic shock on CO2 levels
• Russia’s plans to tighten 2030 climate goal criticised as ‘baby steps’
• Electric cars help limit climate change despite blackspots in India, Poland
• Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans

And in climate conversations

• Coronavirus pandemic shows we need new ways to look after the Earth and each other
• From summits to stimulus: Nature-based solutions can help

The post Green bailouts? – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

Emissions by Russia, the world’s fifth biggest emitter, plunged after smokestack industries collapsed after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and are still only around half the levels in the UN’s benchmark year of 1990.

All countries are under pressure to announce more ambitious policies on climate change in 2020, the first five-year milestone of the Paris climate agreement, with calls to link stimulus packages to combat the coronavirus to a greener economy.

In a draft plan stretching to 2050, Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development projected that emissions would rise to the equivalent of 2.08 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030, including land use and forestry, or 67% of 3.11 billion tonnes recorded in 1990.

The 2030 level would be up from 1.58 billion tonnes in 2017, or 51% of 1990 levels, according to the “basic” scenario in the plan, published in Russian on Monday.

The 2030 goal is more ambitious, however, than the existing target to limit 2030 emissions to 75% of 1990 levels, or 2.33 billion tonnes, submitted by Moscow as its contribution to the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Coronavirus slows developing nations’ plans to step up climate action in 2020

Under the new draft goal, Russia would seek to reduce demand for fossil fuels and boost renewable energy. It would also upgrade insulation for buildings and encourage energy efficiency from petrochemicals to agriculture, it said. It also noted some benefits from warming, such as greater access to shipping routes in the Arctic north.

By 2050, the basic scenario projected that emissions would dip to 1.99 billion tonnes, or 64% of 1990 levels.

“This is not an ambitious plan … it would allow emissions to rise,” Niklas Höhne, founding partner of the New Climate Institute, told Climate Home News.

“It’s not in line with the Paris Agreement. Countries need to go for the highest possible ambition”. He said that a Russian overview of its climate policies submitted to the United Nations in 2019 was more ambitious than the new plan.

“We welcome this as a start but it’s only baby steps,” Vladimir Chuprov, campaign director of Greenpeace in Moscow, told CHN. He said Moscow’s plan had some positive aspects, such as encouraging the growth of forests that soak up carbon dioxide.

But allowing a rise in overall emissions “isn’t ambitious at all. It means no real progress,” he said.

The Russian ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Russia is the fifth largest emitter after China, the US, the European Union and India.

The United Nations says that global emissions will need to fall by 7.6% a year in the decade to 2030 to get on track to limit the rise in average global temperatures to the strictest goal set in the Paris Agreement of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times to limit heatwaves, floods, droughts and a rise in sea levels.

The Russian plan, now out for review by other ministries, also included a more “intensive” scenario that would allow emissions to rise slightly and then fall to 52% of 1990 levels by 2050, or 1.62 billion tonnes – little changed from current levels.

Governments have ‘historic opportunity’ to accelerate clean energy transition, IEA says

“The transition to the trajectory of an intensive scenario of low-carbon development will allow Russia to achieve carbon neutrality in the second half of the 21st century closer to its completion,” the ministry said in a statement.

A Climate Action Tracker (CAT), run by European research groups including the New Climate Institute, last year rated Russia’s 2015 plan as “critically inadequate”.

President Vladimir Putin has sometimes argued that warming will bring benefits, such as higher farm productivity, to Russia.

CAT said Russia’s decision in October 2019 to ratify the Paris Agreement, long after most other nations, “was more symbolic than substantive, as it did not come with any improvement to its very weak emissions reduction target, nor with an announcement of any new climate policies.” CAT said it was still reviewing the new Russian plan.

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This is where the gas from the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will be produced. Yamal did not originally belong to Russia. The Russian Empire began the colonisation of Yamal in the 16th century.

The Russian empire was mainly interested in profiteering from the region’s fur, which it sold to Europe. One third of the Russian state’s public treasury derived from the fur trade with the West. Before that could happen, land was seized. The indigenous peoples of Yamal resisted colonisation and, in response, the colonialists brutally killed them.

The Soviets separated indigenous peoples from their children and reindeers by force. Indigenous peoples have organised the Mandalada, a movement to safeguard their traditional way of life. After fierce resistance, Mandalada participants were arrested.

The discovery of oil and gas deposits in the Yamal Peninsula, which promised the region prosperity, did not improve, but rather worsened the situation. Gazprom continues to seize the lands of the indigenous peoples of Yamal in an attempt to extract even more gas. As a result, the local population is left without grazing [land] for its reindeer. For the indigenous peoples of Yamal, little has changed since the 16th century: the empire took furs from them and sold them to the West. Now the empire is taking oil and gas from them and selling it to the West. The lion’s share of tax revenue from the sale of fossil fuels does not remain in the Yamal region, but is sent to Moscow.

Russia formally joins Paris Agreement

One of the serious climatic problems in Yamal is gas flaring. It is barbaric and wasteful. Due to procedural imperfections, the gas is simply burned and released into the atmosphere, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. According to the World Bank, Russia is the world’s biggest gas flare emitter. In 2018, Russia accounted for nearly 21.3% of global gas flaring.

In the Yamal Peninsula, there are about 1,500 such flares. Gazprom systematically pollutes the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. In 2015, the local prosecutor’s office in Yamal increased methane emissions six-fold and carbon black emissions 37-fold.

The Russian authorities are not fighting Gazprom’s environmental crimes. The fines and warnings that Yamal prosecutors impose on Gazprom don’t have any impact on the company’s behaviour.

Indigenous Finno-Ugric peoples saw their rights violated during the construction of Nord Stream 2. The gas pipeline destroyed the native Finno-Ugric lands and the Kurgalsky reserve, which is home to rare plants, mosses and bird species.

Nord Stream 2 AG, the company behind the project, has hidden the true value of the Kurgalsky reserve. The real consequences of the construction of the gas pipeline on this nature reserve were never mentioned, be it during the public hearings on the project in Russia and other countries, or in the company’s Espoo report.

Greenpeace Austria has obtained secret minutes of meetings between the Russian government, Nord Stream 2 AG and Gazprom, during which they discussed changes to environmental legislation.

Surveys began illegally, without any permits, on the Kurgalsky reserve. As a result of this intrusion into a unique ecosystem, hundreds of rare plants have been destroyed.

The fight for the world’s largest forest

Double standards are rife when it comes to carving out the routes of the gas pipeline in Germany and Russia.  In Germany, where the value of the coastal territory is lower than that of the Kurgalsky reserve, Nord Stream 2 AG considers that it is possible to use a micro-tunneling construction method. In Russia, under similar conditions and with the incomparably higher value of the Kurgalsky Reserve, the “traditional method of construction with a 85m wide open trench” has been adopted. This method has a negative impact on the ecosystem of the Kurgalsky Reserve.

Nord Stream 2 violates Russian rights. The truth is that after selling Russian gas to the West, there are not enough to meet the needs of the Russian people. Gas programmes have been reduced: 30% of Russians live in gas-free houses.

The Russian authorities fix this internal energy supply problem in the most environmentally damaging way possible: they use coal instead of gas. The operation of coal-fired power plants, which are not equipped with modern filters, leads to real environmental catastrophes. For example, in Krasnoyarsk, residents often witness the “black sky” effect caused by finely fragmented coal dust.

Thanks to the Nord Stream 2 project, Europeans will receive less polluting gas. While the Russians will choke on coal dust, the indigenous peoples of Yamal will continue to suffer from gas combustion by Gazprom and will be deprived of the best pastures, and the unique Kurgalsky reserve will suffer severely. With the proceeds from the sale of fossil fuels, Putin’s regime is able to achieve its archaic political ambitions, carry out political repression, seize the territories of neighbouring states, bribe Western politicians and produce propaganda. Obviously, without the demand for Russian gas, Putin’s plan would simply not work.

Are Europeans okay with this reality and with the price of “cheap” Russian gas?

Yevgeniya Chirikova is a Russian environmental activist who received the Goldman Prize for the Environment in 2012 for her fight to preserve the Khimki forest from the Moscow-St. Petersburg motorway.

The post What is the real cost of cheap Russian gas? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The executive director vacancy at the Green Climate Fund has been openly advertised, with a 12 December deadline for applications. Japan’s foreign ministry took the unusual move this week of publicly nominating an experienced diplomat, Kenichi Suganuma, to the role.

Kaoru Magosaki, a climate change official at Japan’s foreign ministry, told Climate Home News the country wanted to see its $1.5 billion contribution spent wisely.

“Given that we are the largest donor… in that sense we have the largest responsibility to secure the fund’s smooth operation, both in regards to the international community and those who are taxpayers as well,” he said, speaking on the sidelines of Cop24 climate talks in Katowice, Poland.

Touting Japan’s financial clout is provocative, however, on a board set up to give developing countries an equal say on where the money goes.

South African board member Zaheer Fakir said it was for the board to select the executive director based on agreed criteria. The amount of money contributed “holds no weight” in that decision, he told CHN.

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It comes at a critical time for the fund, which is a beacon of cooperation between rich and poor countries to tackle climate change. After a July meeting collapsed in acrimony, the board regrouped in October and agreed to launch a fundraising drive.

The next executive director will be under pressure to slash paperwork demands, speed up the flow of money and show results – all while navigating fraught boardroom politics. In parallel, the board is set to appoint a “facilitator” for the replenishment process.

The GCF reached the bottom of its $10.2bn start-up capital faster than expected, after Donald Trump reneged on $2bn of the US pledge and currency fluctuations hit the value of the remainder. It has allocated $4.6bn to projects in the developing world that cut carbon or build resilience to the impacts of climate change.

Germany was the first to pledge new cash, doubling its contribution to €1.5 billion ($1.7bn). Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, on the other hand, has declared he will not “tip money” into the fund.

Japan is reserving judgment until it sees a performance review, said Magosaki. “We have to secure the accountability of the secretariat. They will probably have to speak out a bit more about their achievements. We have not heard back quite enough for the justification of $1.5 billion yet.”

The moment of truth will come in the third quarter of 2019, when developed countries will be expected to put up money at a pledging summit.

Meanwhile Russia is preparing to make its first donation, an adviser to the delegation told CHN.

As an “economy in transition”, Russia is not obliged to provide climate finance to the developing world under the UN framework. For years, it has been dangling the prospect of a voluntary contribution to the GCF.

Now the country is finalising the legal arrangements to transfer “a few million” dollars to the fund in the next few days, said the adviser, who asked not to be named. That would give it a say in the discussions.

While he could not say whether Russia was seeking a seat on the fund’s board, the adviser suggested the country was well placed to mediate rich-poor disputes. “What we saw [in July] was a standoff between one side of the table and the other side of the table and we really think that Russia… can help to bridge the gap,” he said.

UN secretary general Antonio Guterres expressed support for reform and replenishment at a press conference in Katowice on Tuesday. “The GCF needs improved management to be more effective, but it also needs funds,” he said.

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Human Rights Watch (HRW) found 29 environmental NGOs had been labelled “foreign agents” under a law brought in five years ago. Of these, at least 14 have shut down, researchers confirmed through interviews with former directors. Only four were still evidently active, with the rest unreachable or unwilling to comment.

Efforts to defend forests, educate young people on environmental issues and give voice to victims of radiation accidents have suffered in the crackdown.

“Government has put in place an administrative structure for de-legitimising environmental organisations and activists, effectively smearing them as anti-Russian spies,” Richard Pearshouse, associate environmental director at HRW, told Climate Home News.

The law applies to any organisation that accepts funding from outside Russia and engages in “political activity”. Those registered as “foreign agents” must submit regular reports to the justice ministry or face fines. Criminal sanctions for failure to comply include up to two years’ imprisonment.

Report: Russia, Canada, Brazil record vast forest loss

Former NGOs profiled by HRW said the onerous paperwork, financial penalties and stigma associated with the “foreign agent” label made it impossible to keep operating.

In one example, Spok, a forest conservation charity based in the Karelia region of northwest Russia, was targeted over its public advocacy. The public prosecutor accused it of creating “doubt about the work of the Karelia judicial, law enforcement, and executive bodies in the eyes of the public”.

Spok disagreed with the ruling but did not have the resources to fight it, former chairperson Olga Ilina told HRW. Instead, it dissolved in August 2015 and reformed as a much smaller, solely Russian-funded group reliant on volunteers.

Russia is home to around one fifth of the world’s forests, a vast store of carbon. If preserved, this can help to prevent dangerous climate change; if widely logged, it will worsen global warming.

Bellona Murmansk, a Norwegian-backed NGO, was censured over its involvement in an “eco day” for student summer camps, among other things, and fined 20,000 rubles ($850). It closed in October 2015, unable to pay a further $5,000 fine.

“[Prior to designation] we actively collaborated with state institutions, including schools and public libraries,” its former head Andrey Zolotkov told HRW. “As soon as we received the ‘foreign agent’ label, many government contacts told us that further cooperation was impossible.”

Another targeted organisation, Planet of Hopes, took on the more obviously sensitive subject of nuclear waste accidents in Ozersk, in the southern Urals. Its director Nadezhda Kutepova received a death threat after a TV report on the court case accused the organisation of “industrial espionage using US money”.

On Tuesday, in an unrelated story, the Russian government was accused of covering up a spill of radioactive material.

Report: Gas tanker crosses thawing Arctic without icebreaker for first time

New cases continue to arise. In September 2017, youth environmental movement Aetas was added to the list. It was receiving some funds from Norway’s Nature and Youth to support office overheads, summer camps, trips and city cleanups, according to its website.

Ingrid Skjoldvær, head of Nature and Youth, described the authorities’ actions as a “witch hunt”, as reported by the Barents Observer. “It’s an incredible pity for the important work Aetas is doing in Russia. Environmental problems in the Barents region know no borders and we rely on strong cross-border cooperation,” she said.

President Vladimir Putin named 2017 the “year of ecology”, an initiative characterised by conferences and events.

A Russian environmental campaigner told Climate Home News it had helped public awareness of climate change but delivered no policy changes to speak of.

The same campaigner, who asked not to be named, said the “foreign agent” law was applied in some regions more than others. “The authorities will use this act but only if they need something to pressure this NGO,” he said.

HRW’s Pearshouse claimed the law violates Russia’s human rights obligations and called for it to be repealed.

He cited a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights, to which Russia is a signatory: “[I]n a democratic society even small and informal campaign groups have to be able to carry on their activities effectively. There exists a strong public interest in enabling such groups and individuals … to contribute to the public debate by disseminating information and ideas on matters of general public interest such as … the environment.”

A spokesperson for Russia’s justice ministry denied that the “foreign agent” law was used to smear environmental campaigners. The registration of an organisation as a foreign agent “does not imply a negative assessment” of that organisation by the state, they said, and “thus cannot be perceived as a manifestation of mistrust or a desire to discredit such a non-profit organization or its goals”.

This article was updated on 22 November to incorporate a response from Russia’s justice ministry.

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Despite their concerns, the €10 billion Nord Stream 2 project is taking shape, expected to break ground in 2018 and be complete by the end of 2019. In the middle of April, the pipeline’s developer, Gazprom, started the environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure in Russia. The 1200- kilometre-long pipeline is to connect Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea, passing through the territory of three EU countries: Finland, Sweden, and Denmark.

So far the debate has largely focused on the energy security implications of handing yet more market power to Russia – the source of 40% of EU gas imports – and limiting Gazprom’s dependency on other Eastern European transit countries, particularly Ukraine.

No less important is the threat this fossil fuel project poses to the climate. If EU member states are serious about their commitments to tackle climate change, they should use every tool in the box to stop Nord Stream 2.

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The Russians cite environmental factors, among others, as justification for the construction of the pipeline.

Alexey Miller, the deputy chairman of the Gazprom board, declared that Nord Stream 2 would contribute to carbon dioxide emission reductions. The CO2 emissions from burning gas are half those from coal combustion, thus, according to Miller, the benefits for the climate are self-evident. That is questionable.

The pipeline will be able to deliver 55 billion m3 of gas to Europe each year. Burning this gas will produce some 106 million tonnes of CO2 a year, an amount roughly equal to the greenhouse gas emissions of the Czech Republic.

Under the Paris Agreement to halt climate change, every 5 years more and more ambitious emission reduction goals will have to be established. If the EU takes its commitments seriously, its policy cannot end with closing coal-fired power plants. It will have to tackle the impact of gas. Nord Stream 2 risks locking in fossil fuel use for decades.

An assessment of the Nord Stream 2 investment project cannot fail to consider the worsening climate crisis which contributes, among other impacts, to the growing wave of refugees.

Report: New gas pipelines could face EU climate test

The Nord Stream 2 project, which is strongly promoted by Russia, also poses a threat to long-term EU climate and energy policy by undermining the cohesion of the Union. Central and Eastern European countries rightly request that the investment project be blocked, insisting that the Commission is applying double standards of environmental protection and competition.

Thousands of pages have been written to indicate the incompatibility of this investment project with the objectives of the Energy Union, which is to be based, among others, on solidarity and fair competition in the internal gas market.

At present, the European Union depends on Russia for almost 40% of its gas imports. The fact that the Commission tolerates the Russian network monopoly in the internal gas market does not bring us closer either to a competitive market or to a low-carbon economy.

The European Commission has at its disposal a whole spectrum of measures which should be used to protect the environment, climate and internal market. As any investment project which may possibly be harmful for the environment, Nord Stream 2 is also subject to very rigorous regulations on environmental impact assessments, including the so-called transboundary assessment.

In this case, the provisions of the Habitats Directive should also be considered, as, in accordance with the well-established rulings of the Luxembourg Court, they also apply to habitats in territorial waters and habitats situated within the exclusive economic zone of an EU member state. Therefore, Nord Stream 2 should be assessed from the point of view of European environmental law, as well as competition, energy and climate law.

Nord Stream 2 is one of the few projects which, simultaneously, pose a threat to both energy security and climate security of the nations of the European Union. The response to the proposed investment project will be a test for EU institutions, member states and civil society in Europe.

There are two ways to stop the investment and both depend on European solidarity: first, strong disagreement of Scandinavian countries with the project and second, The European Commission’s defence of the Energy Union and climate protection policy.

Marcin Stoczkiewicz is a senior lawyer and head of Central & Eastern Europe at ClientEarth

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“The implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor is already a reality. True, there are those who want to prevent us. It is natural. We came across these ten years ago,” said Aliyev, as reported by the Azerbaijan Press Agency on Tuesday.

The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the world’s largest fossil fuel projects, with a projected construction cost of $46bn.

It is opposed by environmental and human rights groups on the basis it will lock in fossil fuel dependence and its construction across Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Albania and Italy will expose communities to forced relocations and disruption.

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Last month, Azerbaijan was suspended from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global watchdog that sets standards for human rights in countries where the fossil fuel industry operates. Aliyev’s autocratic government had failed to ease pressure on civil society groups, despite repeated warnings from the EITI board.

Speaking to ministers at a quarterly review of the Caucasus nation’s economy, Aliyev said: “I remember at the time when the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline was built, the forces who sought to attack our policy, as well as the Armenian lobby and some circles having a negative attitude to the project, in a variety of ways, mostly with the environmental pretexts tried to thwart our work.

“To a certain extent, they have achieved this. I remember that at that time even some international financial institutions delayed loans. But despite this, in 2006 Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan was opened. And today, some circles, outside forces are again trying, under the pretext of ecology, to delay work in some segments of the Southern Gas Corridor.”

Late in March, the Italian government approved the final section of the pipeline, where it crosses the Adriatic into Puglia. Activists immediately launched protests.

Preparations are being made for the pipeline in the southern Balkans, with Greece and Albania’s governments acquiring land from farmers. In Turkey the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (Tanap) section is already well underway.

Grassroots movements are preparing to resist the construction of the pipeline along its course, but in Turkey the risk of suppression is likely to quell real resistance.

Watchdog suspends Azerbaijan, EU gas pipeline loans threatened

Billions in public finance for the pipeline are already approved from the World Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Several other development banks are considering loans. All are being targeted by activist groups to reconsider or reject their support.

Aliyev said their criticisms had “no grounds” and that all environmental standards would be observed.

“I am confident that 2017 will be decisive in this respect, and next year we should mark the opening of the Tanap project,” he said.

The project is proceeding with strong support from within the European Commission, which argues that it will diversify the bloc’s gas supply away from Russian gas. (Although last month Russian state gas company Gazprom and Italy’s Eni signed a deal that paves the way for the Russian company to access to the pipeline).

What is the Southern Gas Corridor?

BP calls it “arguably the global oil and gas industry’s most significant and ambitious undertaking yet”. It is a three-part pipeline that, if completed, will carry gas from the Shah Deniz 2 oil field in Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea through Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Albania into southern Italy.

The pipeline is supposed to reduce the EU’s dependence on Russian gas. Campaigners argue that it is likely to become a stranded asset as gas demand in Europe is predicted to remain stagnant. Many have raised concerns about deepening Europe’s financial and political cooperation with the autocratic Aliyev regime.

Total cost: Estimated at US$46bn

Timeframe: Construction is underway, due to be completed by 2020

Sections:

• South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP) – Azerbaijan, Georgia
• Trans Anatolian Pipeline (Tanap) – Turkey
• Trans Adriatic Pipeline (Tap) – Greece, Albania, Italy1

Source: TAP

Ownership: At least 11 different companies are involved in the corporate ownership structures of the various sections. Major players include BP, Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR, Turkish Petroleum, Petronas, Lukoil, Total and Snam.

Public finances: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank and Asian Development Bank and are all considering publicly-backed loans for the development in excess of $500m each. The World Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have approved loans totalling $1.4bn.

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With a delivery date pencilled in for mid-2018, ministry of environment officials told Kommersant, a business daily, they wanted to “get the regions to think about working on adaptation plans — so far most of them are busy dealing with consequences but many of those negative changes require adaptation”.

Yet at a recent meeting with the ministry only six regions out of 85, including Moscow and Saint Petersburg, were able to report any progress made on the issue as others point to a lack of funding, Kommersant reports.

The Russian government also adjusted its 2020 climate change action plan in late January, outlining extra risk assessment and adaptation needs for permafrost degradation, sea level rise, increased rainfall and extreme weather events.

Interview: Exxon has ‘excellent future’ in Russia says ex-energy chief

The new version of the plan, first approved in 2011, has various ministries and local officials preparing their plans in 2017-2020.

Permafrost degradation is apparently one of the new adaptation priorities, with these particular risk assessment and adaptation strategies slated for July and December 2018.

A 2016 Country Level Impacts of Climate Change project report by Russia rated both observed and projected impacts associated with terrestrial permafrost, which covers two thirds of the Russian territory, as “high”, with observed “destruction of buildings and infrastructure” due to permafrost thawing.

Alexey Kokorin of WWF Russia told Climate Home that other clear adaptation priorities for Russian regions should include extreme weather, freshwater resources and human health.

Think #climatechange is a hoax? Visit #Norway, says @VidarHelgesen https://t.co/m1U5tLxWU8 pic.twitter.com/StAcaR8oH7

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) February 7, 2017

He also noted some confusing language on the permafrost issue, where the plan actually points to the northward shift of the southern permafrost border instead of overall degradation.

Ministry estimates suggest that Russia loses some 30-60 billion roubles (approximately £400 to 800 million) to extreme weather events every year, and climate change would cost the country up to 1-2% of GDP annually by 2030.

Projected costs for the most affected areas, including Siberia and the Russian Far East, could reach 5% of their regional GDPs.

At the annual UN climate summit in Marrakech, Alexander Bedritsky, Russia’s climate change envoy, confirmed that the country does not intend to ratify the Paris agreement in the near future, citing the need to evaluate its impact on the economy of the world’s fifth largest carbon emitter. This analysis should be ready by early 2018.

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With former Exxon boss Rex Tillerson at the State Department, Trump is likely to lift sanctions on Moscow and usher in an oil investment boom.

That is the view of Igor Yusufov, CEO of the state oil company Rosneft from 2001-2004 and energy minister during Vladimir Putin’s first term as president.

Yusufov will attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington on Friday, which he hopes will herald a new era of relations between the two countries.

Closer ties “would open the doors for massive investment into the Russian oil and gas exploration and production,” he told Climate Home by email.

He expressed confidence sanctions imposed by the US after Russia’s invasion of the Crimea would be lifted, citing a senior Trump advisor. Anthony Scaramucci told the World Economic Forum this week sanctions had had the “opposite effect” to their intention.

At State, Tillerson could get Exxon off human rights chargeshttps://t.co/mCkL8qpEUq pic.twitter.com/osqvHtywK0

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) January 15, 2017

A joint Exxon-Rosneft project in the Kara Sea that was abandoned in 2015 has an “excellent future”, he added.

“I see it as the first step to the future cooperation of giants as Exxon and Rosneft in hydrocarbons production in Arctic regions… shortly we will get the encouraging news on the discovery of a new important deposit”.

Yusufov now runs a US$2bn investment foundation for exploring for oil and gas in Russia. But his former deputy told the Guardian last week he maintains close ties to the Kremlin.

He has known Tillerson, who recently resigned as the boss of Exxon to make himself available as Trump’s top diplomat, since 2002.

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In December 2015, Russia was among 195 countries to adopt the Paris Agreement, agreeing to reach net zero carbon emissions in the second half of this century. That means ending a reliance on fossil fuels.

“Russia sees the Paris Climate agreement as a cornerstone of the future environmentally conscious world… we all either think about effective and generally excepted ways to cut down emissions or confront disastrous consequences pictured for years in catastrophic movies,” said Yusufov.

“At the same time we clearly understand, that at this stage the Russian economy would not survive without hydrocarbons our companies explore and produce.”

This raised the prospect of a transition to renewable energy and the production of carbon nanotubes, which he said could stop millions tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere by replacing intensively manufactured materials.

This transition, he said, could be bolstered by renewed collaboration between the US and Russia on energy.

Vladimir Putin’s global warming fix: Carbon nanotubes

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The proposal, which was shared with Climate Home, passed the scientific committee of the UN Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) on Thursday.

Russia has the power to veto the move when it goes to a full commission debate in Tasmania next week, however, and has consistently opposed territorial limits to fishing vessels in the far south.

The collapse of an ice shelf provides a one-of-a-kind scientific laboratory, said Phil Trathan, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey and one of the authors of the proposal. The newly open waters provide a window into the hidden processes of ocean ecosystems.

“All of these areas are covered by ice and when that goes then there’ll be a whole new community develop under there. And given that a lot of communities develop quite slowly in the Antarctic then we can look at how they develop through time,” said Trathan speaking from Hobart, where the CCAMLR meeting is taking place.

“If fisheries are going to exploit those areas before we have a chance to look at them scientifically then it’s a lost opportunity.”

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Antartica’s great ice shelves project out over the ocean from the fringes of the land. They are in a state of rapid decline, losing a total of 310 cubic km of ice every year.

Once a shelf becomes too thin to support its own weight, it collapses in dramatic style, as was witnessed by satellites when the 3,250 sq km Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated within a few months at the beginning of 2002.

The type of research Trathan describes was conducted by a group from the British Antarctic Survey in 2009, which took measurements from the sea around the former Larsen B shelf. They found massive phytoplankton blooms occurred as a result of nutrients running off the freshly exposed coastlines. These were storing as much carbon as 6,000-17,000 ha of tropical rainforest, uncovering a never before known carbon sink.

“Looking at that without the impact of fishing is really important,” said Trathan.

Worthy though it may be, the politics of CCAMLR are fraught and dominated by a Russian delegation that has continually blocked attempts to protect southern seas from fishing exploitation. Russia has active toothfish interests in the region and stymied the creation of two massive marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Ross sea and East Antarctic.

Report: Elephant seals enlisted in Antarctic sea ice study

On the surface, observers are perennially upbeat that Russia will be constructive each time CCAMLR meets. This time around, there has been a huge diplomatic effort on the part of outgoing US secretary of state John Kerry, who has spoken directly to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov about the MPA proposals.

Kerry has personally championed an MPA in the Ross sea and is motivated to secure it before the end of his tenure.

But people close to the meeting expressed doubts about whether Russia would allow any progress in a year foreign relations between the US and Russia have deteriorated severely.

Climate Home approached the Russian delegation for comment.

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Moscow has invested millions of dollars in two ice-breakers and new military bases MPs heard, with new nuclear submarines also likely to join its Northern Fleet.

“The melting Arctic ice-cap may have significant defence and security implications for neighbouring states,” said the Defence Committee report, which was published on 5 July.

“The receding ice-cap offers significant mining and economic opportunities (the Arctic is rich in oil and gas) which are likely to incite widespread interest, notably from Russia.”

Report: Russia exploiting Arctic melt warns NATO

The inquiry heard experts warn Moscow plans to extract significant fossil fuel and mineral resources from the Arctic from 2020, seeing it as its “primary base for natural resources”.

“At present, the Arctic is not a militarised zone, but increasing tensions leave the future uncertain,” the report added.

“Given the increasing Russian military presence in the Arctic, we shall return to this region in a separate inquiry later this year.”

MPs said they want the government to deliver an assessment of the military implications of Russia’s actions this year.

Rising global land and ocean temperatures have caused significant melt in the Arctic, with sea ice levels projected to fall as warming increases.

The September annual sea ice minimum is now frequently below 5 million square kilometres, don from a previous average of 7.5 million square kilometres. In 2012 the figure fell to 3.6m sq km.

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A 12-year-old boy died after consuming infected venison, other people are believed to have died or become infected with the disease, and thousands of reindeer suspected of carrying it have been killed and incinerated.

One of the main reasons cited for the outbreak of anthrax – one of the world’s most deadly pathogens – is an unprecedented heatwave experienced in the north Siberia region in recent weeks.

Temperatures have been between 25C and 35C, which is way above the average for the time of year.

Anthrax, an infection caused by the bacterium Bacillum anthracis, can occur naturally in certain soils, with infection usually spread by grazing animals. It has also been developed for use in chemical warfare.

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The last recorded outbreak of anthrax in Arctic Russia was in 1941, when several people and thousands of reindeer died. But scientists say it’s likely that the hot weather has caused permafrost in the area to melt, exposing the carcasses of buried animals infected with anthrax 75 years ago.

Another possible source of the outbreak is from the bodies of people who died from anthrax in the 1930s and early 1940s. The nomadic Nenets and Khanty people, who mainly herd reindeer, do not bury their dead in the ground but place bodies in wooden coffins on a hillside.

The theory is that the hot weather has resulted in anthrax spores being released from burial sites and carried elsewhere by the wind.

July 2016 was absolutely the hottest month since the instrumental records began. pic.twitter.com/GQNsvARPDH

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) August 15, 2016

Professor Claire Heffernan, a specialist in infectious diseases at the School of Veterinary Science at the University of Bristol, UK, has previously warned of the impact of changes in climate on disease in animal and human populations in the Arctic region. And she says the present outbreak is likely to be repeated as the warming continues and forgotten burial sites are exposed.

She told Climate News Network: “The health of both human and wildlife populations in the Arctic is deeply intertwined, perhaps more so than in other geographies, It is likely we will see much, much more of this disease as contaminated areas that were once marked are now long forgotten.”

More than 40 people suspected of being infected have been hospitalised. Reports from the area say there are plans to vaccinate more than 40,000 reindeer in an attempt to stop the lethal disease spreading further.

Permafrost diaries: Heading deeper into Siberia

Dmitry Kobylkin, the area’s governor, told the English-language Siberian Times newspaper that the death of a young boy from anthrax came as a shock.

He said: “God knows, we made strenuous efforts from the first day, did everything possible, to save the lives of everyone . . . but the infection was wily, returning 75 years later, and took the child’s life.”

Professor Heffernan says other diseases – in particular, tuberculosis (TB) – are becoming an increasing problem in Arctic communities.

In pictures: Russian weather station on the edge of melting permafrost

Disease is spread not just because of warmer weather conditions but also by changing lifestyles. Previously nomadic communities are moving into settlements, in part due to shrinking ice cover on traditional herding and hunting grounds. In such townships, which often lack proper medical and sanitation facilities, diseases are easily spread.

More synergistic and joined-up disease surveillance systems need to be set up across the Arctic in order to counter health threats, Professor Heffernan warns.

She says: “The unique geo-politics of the eight Arctic nations has the potential to provide the world with an example of how effective bio-security can transcend national boundaries rather than an example of how diseases can do so.”

But increasing temperatures and the thawing of permafrost in Siberia are not only affecting health. It’s believed that large sinkholes appearing in the region in recent years have been caused by explosions as permafrost melts and releases large quantities of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas.

The thawing of permafrost has also led to more fossil-fuel exploration in the region. The Yamal is now a major area of activity for Russia’s oil and gas industry.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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That’s the warning from WWF Russia, which has released pictures of what it says is a government weather station about to topple into the sea.

Since 2009 over 70 metres of coastline has been eroded, said glaciologist Alexander Aleynikov, a development he describes as “very impressive”.

Satellite images of Vize island in 2009 and 2016 illustrate the extent of erosion (Pic: WWF Russia)

Vize is located in the far north of the Kara Sea, which has traditionally remained frozen for nine months of the year.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center sea ice levels are “well below average” in the Kara Sea this year. The Arctic average sea ice extent is the third lowest since records started.

Temperatures were as much as 3-6C above average in the region, causing significant retreat of ice cover to the northern edges of Svalbard, Franz Josef and the new Siberian Islands.

Along with the weather station, polar bears, walruses and gulls count Vize Island as home (Pic: WWF Russia)

One side effect is that waves and resulting coastal erosion is increasing while once-solid areas of permafrost are disintegrating.

“Previously it was thought that the greatest rate of destruction of the coast in Russia and in the world is on the New Siberian Islands, which are wearing away 5-15 meters a year, and sometimes – 20 m after a heavy storm,” said Oksana Lipka, an official at WWF Russia.

“It is likely that on the Vize Island speed of the coast destruction is even higher. It is necessary to continue monitoring.”

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In notes of Monday’s discussion released by Royal’s office, Alexander Khloponin was reported as saying Moscow would assess its goal to cut emissions 30% on 1990 levels.

“The Deputy Prime Minister said that Russia would revise upward its climate action because it had achieved its reduction target for 2030,” read the summary.

Khloponin also told Royal a “preparatory document for ratification” of the Paris Agreement would be ready by October, although did not specify when Russia would formally join the UN pact.

Report: Russia joins US in filing Paris climate change pledge

Russia’s climate plan was described as a “magnum opus of hypotheticals” by one analyst when it was released last April, requiring little in the way of emission cuts from industry.

Depending on how the reductions are calculated, the country could already have met its goal if carbon soaked up by its vast forests was used in the final sums, said a Finnish diplomat.

Last week, the country’s climate negotiator Oleg Shamanov told Reuters that Moscow wanted to see the rules for the Paris Agreement before it would sign up.

“The core issue to create the landscape conducive to joining is the development of the book of rules,” he said.

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(credit: Kremlin)

By Alex Pashley

Where world leaders gushed before a UN climate summit, Vladimir Putin gave a sales pitch. 

Help Russia scale up nanotechnology, its president exhorted an international audience in his five minutes at the podium.

Those extraordinary molecules could manipulate aluminium to make lightweight airplanes, sturdier cement, or cables more ductile than copper. In theory.

Less material means lower carbon emissions spewed by foundries and plastic makers as part of the industrial process.

“Literally we are standing ready to exchange those technological solutions,” Putin said.

The fibres used at nanoscale (one billionth of a metre) could cut CO2 160-180 million tonnes (Mt) by 2030, he claimed. Russia emits 2,322 Mt CO2-equivalent a year, or 5.4% of global emissions, according to World Resources Institute data.

Carbon nanotubes have been proven to work under laboratory conditions, but are years from being commercially viable.

Russia, one of the planet’s top historical polluters, say it seeks to drive down high costs through investing in R&D to make the technology more competitive.

State-owned technology investment firm Rusnano planned to funnel over 30 billion rubles (US$403 m) to companies such as OCSiAl last year for such projects.

Chairman and former Kremlin official Anatoly Chubais, who masterminded the firesale of the country’s public assets in the 1990s, is ebullient.

Emissions prevented by adding nanotubes to materials will be equal or greater than those saved by renewable energies by 2030, he told the Siberian Times in October, while attending a trade forum in Japan.

And those are conservative assumptions, he said. Rusnano aims to boost its production of the materials from 0.2 tonnes to 30-40t within two to three years. Global output was just 2t in 2014.

They would be tackling industrial processes that account for 28% of global greenhouse gases, the company calculates.

But an American expert criticised Putin’s speech as “bewildering” and said it would have a negligible effect on cutting emissions.

“This is really a bunch of nonsense and I feel Russians walking away from that meeting are rubbing their hands saying: ‘They bought it’,” said James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Producing nanotubes wouldn’t recoup the energy expended at blazing temperatures to produce them, he added. Besides, ventures in the US, East Asia and Europe were making surer progress with stronger patent systems and better scientists.

Report: At UN, Putin bids to sponsor climate forum

Alan Windle, emeritus professor in materials science at the University of Cambridge, took a more positive view. Companies had to get developing the product, rather than delaying on further research if they wanted to make breakthroughs.

“I’m very excited by the level of Russian investment, because I think the potential of other big-scale investments could be a de-risking step,” he said. “This could lead to real progress.”

Separately, Putin repeated Russia’s aim to slash emissions 70% on 1990 levels within 15 years at the summit, by using its vast forests as carbon sinks.

That plan was “a magnum opus of hypotheticals,” said Thomas Hale at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, on its announcement in March 2015.

This story was updated to reflect comments by James Tour and correct Russia’s annual carbon emissions which were stated incorrectly.

The post Vladimir Putin’s global warming fix: Carbon nanotubes appeared first on Climate Home News.

Wind power plays the biggest role in the study’s 100% renewable scenario (Pic: Flickr/Land Rover Our Planet)

By Paul Brown

Russia and the countries of Central Asia could become a highly energy-competitive region by getting all their electricity from renewable sources within the next 15 years, a study has found.

So far, most of the region’s governments appear not to have found the will to realise this potential. But researchers at Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland calculate that the cost of electricity produced entirely from renewables would be half the price of modern nuclear technology and fossil-fuel burning if carbon capture and storage (CCS) had to be used.

This would make all the countries more competitive by cutting their costs, but would require the building of a super-grid to allow countries to share the benefits of a range of renewable energy sources.

The geographical area of the research − which did not include transport or heating − covers much of the northern hemisphere.

Many of the countries in the area rely on the production and use of fossil fuels and nuclear power. As well as Russia, the researched area includes Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, as well as the Caucasus and Pamir regions including Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Total capacity

The modelled energy system is based on wind, hydropower, solar, biomass and some geothermal energy. Wind amounts to about 60% of the production, while solar, biomass and hydropower make up most of the rest.

The total installed capacity of renewable energy in the system in 2030 would be about 550 gigawatts. Slightly more than half of this would be wind energy, and one-fifth would be solar. The rest would be composed of hydro and biomass, supported with power-to-gas, pumped hydro storage, and batteries.

Currently, the total capacity is 388 gigawatts, of which wind and solar account for only 1.5 gigawatts. The current system also has neither power-to-gas capacity nor storage batteries.

One of the key insights of the research is that energy sectors’ integration lowers the cost of electricity by 20% for Russia and Central Asia. When moving to a renewable energy system, for example, natural gas is replaced with power-to-gas, converting electricity into gases such as hydrogen and synthetic natural gas. This increases the overall need for renewable energy.

“It demonstrates that the region can become one of the most energy-competitive regions in the world”

The more renewable capacity is built, the more it can be used for different sectors: heating, transport and industry. This flexibility of the system reduces the need for storage and lowers the cost of energy.

“We think that this is the first-ever 100% renewable energy system modelling for Russia and Central Asia,” says Professor Christian Breyer, co-author of the study. “It demonstrates that the region can become one of the most energy-competitive regions in the world.”

The study is one of a number completed to see how various regions of the world can switch to renewables. All show that the barrier to progress is political will, and not a lack of affordable technology.

Although Central Asia rated hardly a mention at the Paris climate talks last month, effects of warming are already evident in the region, and governments are waking up to the dangers of climate change and the benefits of renewables.

Glacier losses are already significant, and scientists calculate that half of them would disappear with a temperature increase to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

There are fears that this would increase tensions between governments over shared water resources used for irrigation and human consumption.

Especially vulnerable are the low-income and mountainous countries of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which rely heavily on hydropower for their electricity. Kyrgyzstan has such low carbon emissions that it barely registers, but it is looking at ways of cutting its emissions on a per capita basis as an example to the rest of the world.

Green economy

Even oil-rich Kazakhstan signed up to the Paris Agreement and set targets for emission cuts. It is one of the world’s biggest emitters per unit of GDP, but has adopted a national plan to go for a green economy, with a fledgling carbon emissions trading scheme.

Despite these encouraging signs, most of the countries of the region suffer from lack of transparency in government and little pressure from the environment groups that are often helpful in fostering international co-operation.

Most governments have formally adopted policies supporting renewable energy generation, including feed-in tariffs, but high fossil fuel subsidies, low electricity prices and comparatively high technology costs still hinder the extensive deployment of renewable energy.

The region’s share in electricity generation (excluding large hydropower) remains very low. It varies from less than 1% in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to about 3% in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Kazakhstan, which is expected to become the biggest renewable energy player in the region, is taking the first steps towards exploitation of its substantial wind energy potential, while Uzbekistan is building the first on-grid photovoltaic park in the region, with support from the Asian Development Bank.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network, with additional reporting by Komila Nabiyeva, a Berlin-based freelance journalist from Uzbekistan who reports on climate change, energy and development: komila.berlin@web.de

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Pro-Russian protesters remove a Ukrainian flag and replace it with a Russian flag in front of the Donetsk Oblast Regional State Administration building in March 2014 (credit: wikimedia commons)

By Alex Pashley

Ukraine is using conflict with Russian-backed rebels to justify lacklustre climate proposals, according to campaigners.

The eastern European country pledged on Wednesday to cut emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 in its contribution to a UN climate pact.

That is a de-facto rise of more than 40% on 2012 levels of 402 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent, as the country’s emissions plummeted with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Running to five pages, the climate plan included little detail on policies to back up the target.

The Poroshenko government said it would revise the pledge “after the restoration of its territorial integrity and state sovereignty”.

National pledges form the basis of a climate agreement set to be signed off by 195 countries in Paris in December.

Russia absorbed Crimea after a plebiscite in March 2014, with sporadic conflict with pro-Kremlin rebels in the East occurring until this month’s ceasefire.

Cement and steel were needed to rebuild railways and oil pipelines destroyed by fighting which had hit 20% of its “economic potential”, the communication read. Unrest in the industrial heartland Donbas region in the East has put power stations and coal mines out of action.

Unambitious

Iryna Stavchuk, climate change director at the National Ecological Centre of Ukraine (NECU), an NGO, said the government was using the conflict as a way to justify weak policies comparable to those tabled by lesser developed countries.

“We think it is an excuse. War is war, but actually to reduce dependency on Russia we think Ukraine desperately needs energy efficiency and development of renewables to reform it quickly,” she told Climate Home from Kiev.

More than half of the country’s energy supply comes from its uranium and coal resources, while natural gas plays an important role. Last year, Ukraine sourced over half its gas in Russian imports, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Report: Ukraine crisis highlights EU’s fragile energy supply lines

A clause to review the pledge on Russia’s relinquishing of Crimea was “just a way to show Ukraine understands that the target is not ambitious,” said Stavchuk, adding the plan already counted the annexed region.

Lacking capacity and resources, Ukraine received support from UNDP, USAID and EU-led programme Clima East in drafting its “intended nationally determined contribution” (INDC) from April to August.

An earlier draft country energy strategy for 2035, helped by USAID, indicated it could achieve a far greater emissions cut than proposed, at 65% below 1990 levels.

The bodies came up with proposals for how the country, which is three-times more energy-intensive than the EU average, could cut carbon.

Major shock

Those recommendations were dropped from the final UNDP-led document, a source close to the drafting told Climate Home, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the changes.

“It was a major shock to see a document with 25 pages of argumentation used in a systematically misleading way,” the source said. Germany had provided €200,000 of support for the process.

NECU has accused the UNDP of putting a “misleading, politically biased” set of proposals before the government, of which the option with least efforts was approved.

A UNDP spokesperson said in an email that the agency’s contribution to the INDC development was “one of support, not advice or direction”.

“The final outcome is very much owned and managed by the Government.”

Ukraine’s hryvnia sunk to a five-year low in February as the government devalued the currency to stave off default. A slumped economy means businesses aren’t sizing up investments but fighting for survival.

For now, a treaty with the EU that obliges Ukraine to make energy efficiency reforms was the singular positive policy in a country lacking a climate plan.

And that may take some time longer to emerge, if Kiev sticks to its demand for the return of Crimea.

“When they use that as an argument, this is obviously a good way of highlighting how big the trouble is,” said the source. “It is all very sad.”

This artcle was updated to add UNDP statement

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(credit: UN photo)

By Alex Pashley

Vladimir Putin’s first speech at the United Nations in over a decade ended on a cryptic offer to host a climate change forum.

Moscow was ready to co-sponsor an event to tackle depleting natural resources, habitat destruction and climate change, the Russian president said in a widely-anticipated podium address on Monday.

Putin hinted current plans to rein in greenhouse gas emissions were faltering and advocated a change of tack, with little detail on what that would entail.

“We might defuse the problem for a while for a while by setting quotas on harmful emissions… but we need a completely different approach. New technologies inspired by nature,” the former KGB officer told the plenary hall in New York.

Putin moves into a climate change section without having made many waves on Syria and Ukraine. Long on rhetoric, short on specifics. #UNGA

— max seddon (@maxseddon) September 28, 2015

The intervention is surprising as Moscow has been quiet on the climate debate in recent years, showing little interest in the global deal due to be signed at a December summit in Paris.

Analysis: Ahead of Paris, Russia becomes a climate policy wallflower

The country was one of the first to put forward its national plan in March, where it pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions 25-30% on 1990 levels by 2030.

If the full sweep of its forests were taken into account, it could reduce its greenhouse gases by as much as 75%, it said.

Critics said the pledge was vague and full of loopholes.

The post At UN, Putin bids to sponsor climate forum appeared first on Climate Home News.

Cracks on Arctic sediment. The deep carbon freezers release gases like methane and carbon dioxide on thawing (Credit: wikimedia commons)

By Alex Pashley

Vast wastes of defrosting tundra could inflict financial losses of more than half global output as leaked heat-trapping gases stoke warming, according to new research on Monday.

Hundreds of billions of tonnes of methane and CO2 will be unlocked by the end of next century if emissions continue to rise at current levels, the study published in journal Nature Climate Change said.

The stark knock-on effect could top $43 trillion over that period as economies bear the brunt of extreme weather and rising sea levels.

“The results show just how much we need urgent action to slow the melting of the permafrost in order to minimise the scale of the release of greenhouse gases,” co-author Chris Hope at the University of Cambridge said in a statement.

Permafrost diaries: Our Russia reporter heads into Siberia

About 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon are held in soils in the form of frozen organic matter across an Arctic band across Siberia, Greenland, and North America.

It is the first time researchers have measured the economic cost of the thawing stores of carbon. Previous studies have sharpened the link to man-man climate change but have downplayed a “carbon bomb”.

“We need to estimate how much it will cost if we do nothing how it will cost if we do something and how much we need to spend to cut back greenhouse gases,” added Hope, who worked with the University of Colorado’s Kevin Schaefer on the assessment.

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the globe, leading to receding ice caps threatening sea-level rise, and gradual permafrost melt.

Rising emissions raise the likelihood of catastrophic events like the melting of the Greenland ice sheets, and hit countries’ prosperity through loss of agriculture and higher health costs.

Early action

Hope said the calculations increased the predicted impact of climate change by 2200 to $369 trn – a 13% increase.

Countries have vowed to cap warming to 2C on pre-industrial levels by 2100, with national pledges forming the backbone of a climate deal to be signed in Paris in December.

But analysts Climate Action Tracker say the ‘INDCs’ fail to keep warming within ‘safe levels’ and forecast a 3C rise.

Aggressive action to brake emissions could limit the impact by as much as $37 trn to just $6trn, said the researchers.

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The scenic wastes between Dudinka and Norilsk

By Olga Dobrovidova in Igarka

A week ago, I did not know what permafrost looked like or whether one can get lost in the tundra.

As of today, I have fallen into a tundra river (twice) and looked inside the permafrost–ready basement of a house through a giant crack stretching across the house. I don’t know about you, but I call that progress.

RTCC’s permafrost division now even farther north, in Dudinka and Norilsk

[pic 2. This house in Igarka used to be twice as long, but they had to demolish the other half because it was starting to fall apart — you can still see its basement]

The lab has two sites some six or seven kilometres from the town, in the forest-tundra and tundra (it’s okay if you don’t really know the difference — forest-tundra is basically tundra peppered with some very sad patches of trees. It’s a border zone between the two more obvious ecosystems.)

They have boreholes about five meters deep and are monitoring temperatures down there as well as something called active layer thickness — how much permafrost thaws for the summer.

The tundra is really rich and colorful even though it’s now that weird time between its two best seasons. Fall, that is

Translated literally from Russian as blueberry,  I think the correct English would be bog bilberry or perhaps bog blueberry. Very tasty

I am now doing fine with just a little cold, but it was still my personal open water swimming record of sorts. I am pretty sure I caught it on video before the first fall, so it should show up later in my final story.

The next day was First Snow Day. September 12th is probably the earliest I’ve ever seen snow in my life, so I was understandably excited, and even more so about the fact that it hadn’t snowed the day before when I enjoyed meeting Gravel River.

Winter is coming. First snow of the season in Igarka

And then it was boat time. My next destination: Dudinka, a major river and sea port some 270 km downstream from Igarka.

It takes a large passenger ship 11 hours to get there, and while it must be absolutely marvellous in the summer, by September it’s cold enough to spend all your time inside drinking tea and only occasionally dare to go to the upper deck to try and not get blown off the ship while taking photos.

The original name of the Yenisey river, the heart and soul of my home region, meant “big water”. It is pretty big

…and very beautiful

It’s a busy port and the main transport hub for Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium.

Dudinka was also in that fateful paragraph that sent me on my journey of tundra river swimming and cracked houses. According to the same Roshydromet report, 55% of buildings and structures are damaged due to permafrost degradation.

By the looks of it, that figure might be accurate. A lot of buildings in Dudinka have really scary cracks like this one:

That is actually pretty common in Dudinka

Some of them are clearly treated as a cosmetic problem but others can be very serious. I’ll delve deeper into the issue of permafrost damage triage later on.

Dudinka is, as they say in Russia, a town of contrasts

These appear to be the same kind of small lakes I saw before from the helicopter. Also more on them later

In Norilsk, and let’s just say that’s not a sunset haze in the photo. #thefrostroads #airpollution #coughcough pic.twitter.com/b1x8xjNz64

— Olga Dobrovidova (@thegreendrafts) September 15, 2015

In the next couple of days I’m going to check out Norilsk’s infrastructure and in particular some of the sites that have reported major incidents just this year. An entrance to a blood transfusion centre suddenly collapsed this June, injuring a donor.

I’ll also look into the dark history of building Norilsk and some environmental issues that are directly connected to the state of permafrost and the changing climate.

More tales to come from the land of thin ice, metaphorically and sometimes literally

Olga Dobrovidova’s trip is being funded by a grant from the Earth Journalism Network.

All photos by Olga Dobrovidova

The post Permafrost diaries: Heading deeper into Siberia appeared first on Climate Home News.

More on this otherworldly sight later (Pic: Olga Dobrovidova)

By Olga Dobrovidova in Igarka

This story, just like many others, starts with a sentence. 

The sentence, found in the Second Assessment Report on Climate Change in Russia presented by Roshydromet, the Russian state meteorological service, in 2014, reads as follows:

Almost 60% of buildings and structures in Igarka, Dikson and Khatanga and 100% in some small settlements in the Taymyr district are damaged due to permafrost degradation.

I first read this sentence in July 2014, before the report even went public. Thirteen months (I couldn’t let it go) and one Earth Journalism Network climate journalism grant later, I find myself gently touching permafrost eight and a half metres underground.

Listed in the sentence are small towns and villages in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Krai — a region 9.6 times the size of UK that stretches from almost Mongolia to the Kara Sea in the Arctic. It also happens to be my homeland.

Now, I come from Krasnoyarsk, the regional capital in the south. I suspect an overwhelming majority of people born in Krasnoyarsk, like me, may have never been so far north.

So, to me, Igarka, Dikson and Khatanga are just these mysterious names that only exist in TV weather forecasts — with an occasional classmate or colleague who moved to Krasnoyarsk to study or work and sometimes goes home to see their family.

I know these places must exist (and it must be pretty cold most of the time), but that’s all — I have no mental images of what they look and feel like.

Permafrost

Then there’s permafrost. I have spent most of my relatively short career covering all things climate, from the Kyoto Protocol to renewable energy to climate models, but I did it from a desk at a Moscow news agency and occasionally from UN climate conferences.

I filed several stories highlighting the gravity of the problem with permafrost thawing due to climate change and talked about it at length, sometimes to strangers. But I had never seen actual permafrost “in the wild”, despite it covering two thirds of the Russian territory.

That obviously didn’t take anything away from the issue, which was important regardless of whether I personally had witnessed its scale, but it did bother me a little.

And now I am told that there are places where everything is damaged by permafrost degradation, and then there are other places where, fortunately, it’s just two out of every three buildings. Naturally, I just had to find out what the frozen hell that looks like.

One does not simply get to these places, though, especially in September, which is moments away from a dark and rather unforgiving northern winter (you can imagine how many Game of Thrones puns and jokes I have gone through). After extensive and creative planning, my trip now involves a plane, a helicopter, a boat and a bus.

The view from my first ever helicopter flight (Pic: Olga Dobrovidova)

After a total of four hours in flight with some fellow passengers and lots of cabbage (you gotta get the cabbage to these remote villages somehow), I am now writing this blog from Igarka, a town of five thousand people and streets that mostly look like this:

Yes, this is a street. Named after Yuri Gagarin, no less (Pic: Olga Dobrovidova)

Still a street (Pic: Olga Dobrovidova)

You know how sometimes streets have Soviet aeroplanes parked in them? (Pic: Olga Dobrovidova)

I have yet to carefully survey the streets that do have “buildings and structures” and see if the 60% statistic holds true, but I have already seen some damage — pretty close to where I am staying:

The dog seems unfazed at the building slowly crumbling. What permafrost degradation? (Pic: Olga Dobrovidova)

In the next several weeks I’m going to write, tweet and occasionally Instagram about my adventures in the Siberian North, all kinds of permafrost (yes, of course there are many) and the people who dare to live and build on it.

Check out my hashtag #thefrostroads and stay tuned for more wild tales from almost winter here on RTCC.

This is my first underground rainbow (Pic: Olga Dobrovidova)

This is the first of a series of reports on the social and economic impacts of permafrost degradation in the Russian Arctic. Olga Dobrovidova’s trip is being funded by a grant from the Earth Journalism Network.

The post Permafrost diaries: Touching down in northern Siberia appeared first on Climate Home News.

Mount Denali (former McKinley) is seen from a window on Air Force One during descent into Anchorage, Alaska on Aug 31. Glaciers on the mountain are melting (Credit: White House)

By Alex Pashley

At least ten countries pledged to halt glacier melt and thawing permafrost in the Arctic at a conference on Monday.

Foreign ministers and officials from the European Union, Japan and United States, signed a joint statement during the State Department-devised Glacier summit in Anchorage, Alaska.

They endorsed mounting scientific research documenting retreating sea ice, set out an action plan to curb black carbon emissions and called for more research to measure the advance of permafrost and wildfires.

But China and India did not sign the document, somewhat limiting its impact.

“Climate change poses a grave challenge in the Arctic and to the world,” the declaration read.

“But these challenges also present an imperative for cooperation, innovation, and engagement as we work together to safeguard this vital region and to inform the world why the Arctic matters to us all.”

Just released! Foreign ministers at #GLACIER issue statement on #climatechange and the Arctic: http://t.co/r07Ij06U8b pic.twitter.com/FSOqU8A7B6

— Department of State (@StateDept) August 31, 2015

The US holds the rotating chair of an intergovernmental forum of eight Arctic countries, the main vehicle to tackle issues facing the region.

The Glacier summit was an ad hoc event, in this regard, providing a set piece for President Barack Obama to call on nations to sign a strong climate pact to cut emissions.

The statement said sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet and nearly all glaciers have shrunk over the past 100 years. Summer sea ice has fallen by 40% since 1979, while warmer and drier weather is stoking wildfires.

The chance of “significant feedback loops” coming into play could cause irreversible damage, it noted.

The signatories acknowledged the importance of the Framework for Action on Black Carbon and Methane, short-lived pollutants which accelerate ice melt, and urged all oil and gas firms to join the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership.

And they reaffirmed the need for a “successful, ambitious outcome” at international negotiations to reach a global climate deal in Paris this December.

Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, welcomed the plans.

“To save the Arctic, we need to cut both carbon dioxide as well as the short-lived climate pollutants, starting with black carbon soot, along with long-lived carbon dioxide,” he said.

“Cutting the short-lived climate pollutants can cut the rate of warming in the Arctic by up to two thirds.”

This story has been updated to reflect that Russia and Canada did sign the declaration unlike previously stated along with all Arctic states . This was due to a misinterpretation of the statement, later clarified by a State Department spokesperson.

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Gas flaring: Russian companies claimed carbon credits for investments they would have made anyway (Flickr/Ken Doerr)

By Megan Darby

A UN-backed carbon offsetting scheme enriched Russian and Ukrainian companies but made climate change worse, according to a damning new analysis.

In the first study to look in depth at the “joint implementation” mechanism, the Stockholm Environment Institute found flawed carbon accounting was widespread.

It actually increased emissions by some 600 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, researchers estimate – more than a year’s worth of UK emissions.

Anja Kollmuss, lead author and SEI associate: “We knew, going into the research, that we would probably find a rather large number of projects that had problems. But we were surprised at the extent.”

Plausibility of “additionality” claims for 60 sample projects (SEI Policy Brief)

Joint implementation was introduced to allow developed countries to trade some of the carbon-cutting commitments they had made under the Kyoto Protocol.

The idea was to direct finance towards the most cost-effective projects, while preserving the overall level of climate benefits.

Typically, an industrial emitter in the EU would buy carbon credits from a Russian company to avoid making more costly investments itself.

One of the key criteria was “additionality” – the issuing company had to show it needed carbon revenues to make the emissions cuts.

Yet since its inception in 2008, the scheme has been dogged by reports of weak environmental standards.

The SEI report shows just how prevalent bad practice was. Some 73% of credits were issued for projects that would likely have gone ahead anyway, it found.

‘Printing money’

The major winners were Russian and Ukrainian companies, which issued 90% of the credits.

In Russia, the most common type of project was to use gas produced as a by-product of oil extraction, instead of flaring it. In Ukraine, it was preventing coal waste fires.

Many of these initiatives were already under way when the developers saw the opportunity to cash in on the UN scheme, according to the study.

They were “clearly not motivated by carbon credits,” said Vladyslav Zhezherin, an independent consultant in Ukraine and co-author of the study. “This was like printing money.”

The researchers highlighted one particularly perverse case in a separate Nature Climate Change article.

Russian chemical plants ramped up production of HFC-23 and SF6 – two potent greenhouse gases – so they could claim more credits for reducing waste emissions.

This essentially amounted to “damaging the climate for profit,” said Lambert Schneider, an SEI associate and co-author of the study.

Analysis: Russia becomes a climate policy wallflower

Nearly all projects (97%) were regulated by their national governments.

But Russia and the Ukraine had no process for investigating or prosecuting dodgy dealers, said Zhezherin.

“We don’t know for sure, but we suspect there was some element of corruption in getting these projects approved.”

In a statement to RTCC, Konrad Raeschke-Kessler, vice-chair of the Joint Implementation supervisory committee recommended the whole mechanism should be supervised collectively by countries.

“This study focuses on that part of JI that is not subject to international oversight, but is instead left up to the individual countries to administer and ensure integrity,” he said by email.

The main reason for governments to quality-control the carbon credits issued was that they had to cancel an equivalent volume of their own emissions allowances.

But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine’s industrial bases had shrunk drastically, making their Kyoto targets easy to meet.

“They didn’t have very much incentive to ensure strict rules, because they didn’t have to worry about losing Kyoto allowances,” said Kollmuss.

These lax standards meant the market was flooded with cheap offsets, diverting funds from projects that could have delivered genuine benefits.

Kollmuss added: “You can have a lot of countries who carefully issue offsets, but if you have a couple of bad actors, you can impact the whole market.”

Lessons for Paris

Joint implementation is now effectively dormant. No more credits can be issued until countries ratify an extension of the Kyoto Protocol. Only 36 have done so.

In any case, demand is weak, as most countries are outperforming their Kyoto goals.

But policymakers must learn from its mistakes, the report authors said, as countries aim to strike a new global climate deal in Paris this December.

Some would like to see a Paris deal endorse a role for market mechanisms – posing an “urgent need” to make sure they are environmentally sound.

“You could definitely do it [carbon offsetting] in a more robust way, if there is political will to do so,” Kollmuss told RTCC.

That would require ambitious national targets, backed by clear international accounting rules and oversight, she said.

But Kollmuss questioned whether there was political will to enforce strict standards. “From the discussions I have seen so far, countries don’t want that,” she said.

The post Russia, Ukraine dodgy carbon offsets cost the climate – study appeared first on Climate Home News.

A Greenpeace protest against Gazprom oil drilling in the Arctic (Flickr/Greenpeace Switzerland)

By Megan Darby

Russia has submitted a claim to the UN for 1.2 million square kilometres – an area larger than France and Germany – of Arctic territory.

Citing studies of the extent of the continental shelf, Moscow is seeking to extend its sovereignty over much of the North Pole.

A similar bid in 2001 was rejected, but the foreign ministry says it has fresh data.

It conflicts with a claim filed by Denmark in December 2014, which is still under consideration. Canada is also expected to make a pitch in the coming months, although that could be held up by federal elections in October.

Robert Huebert, a Canadian expert on the Arctic and international relations, told RTCC other countries were likely to welcome Russia “playing by the rules” – in contrast to its military incursion into the Ukraine.

Russia has 14 icebreakers under construction and several more under planning (Pic: Christopher Michel/Flickr)

It comes ahead of a key summit of Arctic powers, at which US president Barack Obama is set to highlight the threat posed by climate change.

Pentagon officials have warned that the US military is ill-equipped to deal with emergencies in the harsh polar conditions as global warming opens it up to oil exploration and shipping.

The area claimed by Russia is estimated to cover 594 oil fields and 159 gas fields, the Barents Observer reported, as well as nickel and gold deposits.

Huebert predicted the UN would act “fairly quickly” to decide the matter, perhaps within a year.

Once the boundaries are settled, firms can start trying to extract resources, he said. “If it is an international dispute or an uncertain scene, companies don’t like that. If you have settled the political disagreements that are there, it probably speeds up the development process.”

Report: Arctic ice melt to redraw global shipping routes

Greenpeace raised concerns about an oil rush as sea ice melts, threatening the pristine environment and climate goals.

Arctic campaigner Vladimir Chuprov said: “The melting of the Arctic ice is uncovering a new and vulnerable sea, but countries like Russia and Norway want to turn it into the next Saudi Arabia.

“Unless we act together, this region could be dotted with oil wells and fishing fleets within our lifetimes.”

The environmental group has already clashed with the Russian authorities on the issue, with 30 of its activists arrested in 2013 trying to board a Gazprom oil rig. They were granted an amnesty after two months in a Russian prison.

More recently, campaigners have targeted Shell over plans to drill for oil off Alaska. Norway’s Statoil is also exploring the region.

Scientists have warned extracting such oil is incompatible with global efforts to limit temperature rise to 2C.

The post Russia lays claim to vast Arctic territories appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Flickr/PROAndrey Naumov)

By Olga Dobrovidova

Almost a year and a half into international sanctions, Russia finds itself looking forward to the UN climate summit in December from a bizarre diplomatic limbo.

It is not clear whether the country has any real allies left outside its traditional small circle of post-Soviet friends sans Ukraine, yet there is neither open antagonism nor reasons to expect trouble in Paris.

Russian officials were nowhere to be seen at the most recent Major Economies Forum meeting in Luxembourg, a distinctly US-dominated initiative of which Russia technically is a member.

The latest modest success of another forum where the two meet, the Arctic Council agreeing on a temporary ban on fishing in the Arctic high seas, was overshadowed by the fact that it was initially supposed to be last year’s success: the agreement was planned for a Moscow meeting of the council which the US and Canada boycotted in protest over the Crimea annexation.

After a May visit to Moscow, France’s special envoy for the planet, Nicolas Hulot, was “greatly surprised”, as he told EurActiv, by what he called changing attitudes towards climate change. He expressed confidence that any potential trouble in Paris was unlikely to come from Russia.

Putting the R in BASIC

Hosting this year’s BRICS summit, Russia tried to tout the group as a bona fide global counterbalance to the western geopolitical system.

But that is hard to sell when it comes to climate change, where BRICS normally drops the R. Brazil, India, China and South Africa have their own informal negotiating group known as BASIC, while Russia is loosely allied with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US and others in the Umbrella Group.

According to Russian officials, the country was the one to bring climate change to BRICS in the first place.

In 2011, when the issue appeared in the agenda for a meeting in China, Russia’s lead negotiator Oleg Shamanov told RIA Novosti they had introduced this item fully realising that positions within the group were fundamentally different, and countries like India, China and Brazil were all “at the other end of the spectrum”.

Yet he hoped the new venue would help foster understanding and cooperation in the main UN forum as well as create partnerships in adaptation and technology transfer.

Report: BRICS’ leaders back global climate change pact

Four years later, experts agree climate change has yet to move up the group’s list of priorities, even though the recent meeting in Ufa did reaffirm everyone’s readiness to “achieve a comprehensive, effective and equitable agreement”.

It also welcomed Russia’s proposal to host the first meeting of the BRICS ministers of energy in the end of this year and, immediately before that, a balance of interests of “consumers, producers and transit countries of energy resources”.

According to World Bank data, Russia and South Africa are the group’s two net energy exporters, Russia being the world’s second largest crude oil exporter and the first in natural gas.

“I think Russia simply doesn’t see why it needs BRICS on this issue,” said Igor Makarov, of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

“But, to be fair, the other countries also don’t quite see what they need Russia for — they are mainly in a dialogue on finance and technology with Europe and the US. I don’t see BRICS acting together in Paris at all, but there may be more cooperation afterwards.”

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa launched a development bank in Brazil in 2014 (Pic: GovernmentZA/Flickr)

One area this unlikely alliance could actually work on together would be the technical issue of carbon accounting.

Russia, China and India, the world’s top three net carbon exporters, could start lobbying for a more equitable way of sharing the burden of trade-related carbon emissions. But so far that has not been discussed beyond policy papers.

Another, further developed, is a new BRICS development bank. It doesn’t have an official investment policy yet, but could be a route for climate finance.

Makarov said the four BASIC countries, especially India and South Africa, see the bank funding clean energy projects and green energy infrastructure.

Russia’s priorities, albeit not exactly clear or public (the country is said to have already submitted its proposals for the first round of projects to be selected in April 2016), seem to lie in the transport infrastructure sector.

Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia told RTCC that “countries are still sticking to the old ways” and there is no evidence the new bank will be different.

China and the World Bank are supporting large-scale hydropower development in Mongolia, instead of viable solar and wind power alternatives. The Mongolian project has met vocal opposition in eastern Russia as activists say it threatens Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake and largest freshwater reservoir.

Turn to China

The greater turn to China in energy policy and trade, however, did spill over into the climate sector.

The two countries have established a joint “development and climate change” working group, headed by lead Chinese negotiators Su Wei and Yaroslav Mandron, a Russian Ministry of Economics official not in the usual national delegation to the talks.

According to the ministry website, the group had its inaugural meeting just last week, and parties agreed to work out a common agenda of issues such as biofuel production, CTL (coal to liquid) technologies, linking carbon markets and reducing emissions in cities, to be discussed at the next meeting tentatively planned for early 2016.

Last year’s fears of Russia becoming officially isolated at the UN talks have largely turned out to be unfounded.

Observers note that Russia has indeed withdrawn from actively participating in the Umbrella Group work, a tactic that can perhaps be described as polite absenteeism, but the group itself doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

WWF Russia’s Alexey Kokorin told RTCC: “These days Russia is ever closer to Belarus and Kazakhstan, as the three countries have regular consultations and meetings… Kyrgyzstan and Armenia are also friendly but they have their own agenda that is different from that of the three economies in transition.”

In June, Russia and the UN development body established a $25 million trust fund for development, with five pilot projects, mostly in the Central Asian countries, already selected and $2 million to be disbursed this year.

According to Kokorin, so far the projects are not explicitly about climate change mitigation or adaptation but rather about public health, yet they can often have climate co-benefits.

Finally, the Crimea-shaped elephant in the room standing between Russia and Ukraine is still there. Apart from general hostility, this issue can also cause technical difficulties: this year the countries are still reporting on their emissions from 2013, but next year the Russian accounting authority will likely include Crimean emissions in Russia’s official UN greenhouse gas inventory — as will their Ukrainian counterparts.

Lukewarm on warming

Overall, Russia seems to have put any proactive climate policy it may have hinted at before on the back burner. It is slowly drifting towards carbon regulation through technical standards and reporting as opposed to market mechanisms.

The country recently adopted its first set of emissions accounting rules — a law that introduces mandatory reporting for all large emitters from 2017 is still in the works and not expected before the Paris summit.

Earlier this year, the government also pulled funding from a proposed pilot scheme to support emissions reductions and pushed the rollout of a national system of sectoral caps further into 2016.

The vibe, then, is certainly different from that of 2009, when in a single year Russia appointed its first climate change envoy, adopted a climate change doctrine and then sent its president to Copenhagen. It is too early to guess who might lead the delegation this time.

So far this year, the highlight of the national climate policy debate occurred at the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum in June. Environment minister Sergey Donskoy told a panel that by 2030 Russia could be losing 1-2% of its GDP annually due to climate change impacts.

For example, in 2012 catastrophic flooding in the southern town of Krymsk claimed 170 lives and caused some 20 billion rubles (back then around $650 million) in damage.

Latest research by Russian scientists suggests that unprecedented torrential rains which caused the flooding were made possible by rising sea surface temperatures of the nearby Black Sea, at least partially attributed to human activities.

And yet with Russia’s INDC effectively allowing for emissions growth and no mention of adaptation, right now, as the world is approaching peak public attention on climate, it doesn’t seem like Moscow is poised to do anything about it.

The post Ahead of Paris, Russia becomes a climate policy wallflower appeared first on Climate Home News.

It’s difficult to compare different countries’ climate plans (Pic: Flickr/kris krug)

By Gerard Wynn

Recent pledges for national climate action are vague, complicated and barely comparable, casting doubt over the transparency of a prospective global agreement to be reached later this year.

Countries have promised to submit pledges for climate action ahead of a summit in Paris at the end of this year.

In Paris, they are expected to reach a major agreement setting targets for action beyond 2020, for greenhouse gas emissions, financing and measures to adapt to climate change.

The emissions pledges that countries have submitted so far show all of the problems of leaving the task of setting targets to countries themselves.

% change in GHG emissions, 2025 vs 2005

China (CO2 only) 75.51%
Russia 44.84%
Korea 12.56%
Japan -18.49%
Canada -24.09%
US -28.00%
EU -29.20%

The Paris process follows past agreements in Kyoto in 1997, in Copenhagen in 2009 and in Cancun in 2010.

The Kyoto Protocol was a top-down process, where countries negotiated formal, rules-based emissions targets for industrialised nations.

To try and involve developing countries, the Copenhagen and Cancun agreements left it up to countries to decide their own targets voluntarily, rather than negotiate these in advance.

The Paris agreement is also following this voluntary approach, allowing countries to set their own targets. The aim is also to borrow some of the formal, rules-based approach of the Kyoto Protocol, to make some aspects of the agreement legally binding.

The signs so far are not good, as the pledges submitted to date are barely comparable:

1. They target different years, either 2025 or 2030, and with different baselines, including 1990, 2005 and 2013

2. Use different treatments of aspects which will have enormous impact on their ambition, for example whether they will allow the use of international carbon offsets and forest carbon sinks

3. Use different approaches for setting emissions targets, whether absolute emissions, or targets based on the carbon intensity of GDP, or compared with business as usual emissions

4. Measure different greenhouse gases (GHGs), including all the main GHGs, or just carbon dioxide (CO2)

5. In some cases have a range of ambition, raising the question which end of the range is the main target.

Perhaps most seriously, there is a question mark over the quality of national reporting of historical emissions. If this is just educated guesswork, then the targets are meaningless.

This is a problem for all countries. For example, in its latest submission to the United Nations, the US has substantially changed its estimate for historical greenhouse gas emissions in 1990, by tens of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

While such retrospective changes can be seen as an honest attempt to update records with the latest information, they also cast doubt over the measurements in the first place. And if countries do not know what their emissions were in 1990, how reliable are targets for 2025, or 2030?

In a first attempt to try and make the targets more comparable, I have calculated the climate action implied by the latest pledges, for a common target year (2025) and against the same baseline (2005).

The results below show that Russia is planning to increase its emissions, in contrast with South Korea, which is planning to reduce them. Such findings are not flattering to Russia, and underline why a more transparent approach is needed.

Note: this chart uses various, detailed assumptions, to try and overcome the lack of comparability of pledges to date. In short, the chart uses countries’ own estimates for historical emissions, except China where BP energy data are used. The chart uses countries’ own pledges for emissions in 2025 or 2030.

Where the pledges are for 2030, 2025 estimates have been derived from drawing a straight line between the latest historical estimate and the 2030 pledge. China’s pledge is an intensity target; its actual 2025 emissions are calculated using OECD GDP forecasts and UN GDP data (local currency, constant 2005 prices).

Where countries submitted a range, the chart above uses the most ambitious end of that range. In the case of Korea, the chart applies the target for domestic carbon emission reductions.

Gerard Wynn is an energy and climate change consultant. This article first appeared on the Energy and Carbon Blog.

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