A new report produced by the watchdog group Greenpeace documents how Russia’s environmental policies and practices are causing global harm. 

The report, titled Fossil Fuel Empire: The Environment of Post-2022 Russia and the Kremlin’s Threat to Domestic and Global Stability and Sustainability, shows how Russia, in confronting environmental challenges over the past few decades, has gone from “active engagement in the 1990s to deliberate detachment and obstructionism in recent years.” 

Negative trends in a variety of areas, including deforestation, water contamination and land degradation, have accelerated since Russia launched its unprovoked attack on Ukraine. The Kremlin’s need to maintain Russia’s war machine is overriding any concerns about the damage done to ecosystems. It also means that the Kremlin has turned into an arch-opponent of efforts to combat global warming.

“The country increasingly acts as a brake on global progress – both by adopting obstructionist positions in climate, biodiversity and pollution negotiations, and by promoting alternative narratives that emphasize sovereignty, development-first approaches and resistance to tightening international environmental norms,” the report states.

Desperate to earn revenue amid the Western-imposed sanctions regime, Russia is rapidly depleting its natural resources, not just oil & natural gas, but other commodities such as timber. Deforestation is among the top five environmental concerns among Russians, along with industrial air pollution, water pollution, vehicle emissions and poor waste management.

Having lost much of its European market due to sanctions, Russia has reoriented energy exports eastward and southward, especially to China and India. This shift has led to the creation of export infrastructure that threatens “fragile ecosystems, particularly in Siberia and the Arctic, where extraction and transportation involve high environmental risks.”

Meanwhile, the loss of Siberian forestland can contribute to climate change and the melting of permafrost, which can result in increased methane levels in the atmosphere, which, in turn, feed global warming. Much of the timber now being harvested in Siberia is being shipped to China and Central Asian states.

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“Proper forest management practices, aimed at preventing deforestation and enhancing carbon storage, are essential to ensuring that Russia’s forests continue to function as global carbon sinks and storage,” the report states.

Greenpeace also raises an alarm about environmental degradation in the Arctic. The Russia-Ukraine war has brought the work of the Arctic Council, a grouping with a mandate to manage the region’s fragile environment and resources, to a standstill. Over the past two decades, the Arctic has been increasingly militarized, the report adds. 

Concerns about the degradation and depletion of resources are heightened by a lack of reliable data, according to Greenpeace researchers. “Russian authorities have increasingly classified or restricted access to critical environmental data,” the survey notes. “Deforestation statistics are not true, as the official reports exclude illegal logging and wildfire impacts are continuously misreported.”

The report contends the political and economic systems built by the Kremlin to maintain the country’s war effort foster both domestic and international instability.

“The model constructed by the Putin regime threatens not only the future of Russia itself, but also global stability – the Kremlin wages war and stokes other military conflicts, destroys global institutions, accelerates the climate crisis and contributes to the loss of biodiversity,” the report asserts.

“The model in which natural resources are used to enrich the elite, maintain power and wage wars of aggression leads to deep domestic crisis, the degradation of nature and state and social institutions, and a loss of international legitimacy,” it adds.

By Eurasianet

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