Nature can slow Russia's rapid warming. Don't expect the Kremlin to act.

The recent COP 28 summit in Dubai reaffirmed the prevailing wisdom that the most serious threat to humanity is climate change. So grand a challenge naturally demands more than one solution and more than a single line of attack. Renewables, such as solar, wind, geothermal, energy efficiency and a nuclear renaissance, all can contribute to decreasing CO2 emissions. 

However, more should be done.

One approach that is increasingly finding favor across the world is nature-based solutions. Nature-based solutions aim to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural and modified ecosystems, using habitats to remove carbon emissions. Prescriptions and policies vary by location and means, but all are underpinned by benefits that flow from healthy ecosystems.

One key element of nature-based solutions is reforestation, which is of particular utility in areas that are the so-called “lungs” of the planet due to their extensive forests, e.g., Russia and the Amazon. 

In this context, Russia, which could, in principle, become a leader in environmental progress, is in serious danger from multiple and diverse ecological threats.  

The temperature inside Russia is increasing 2.5 times more than anywhere else in the world. Such developments have led biologist Boris Zhukov to warn that melting ice and climate change will release not only viruses and bacteria with which science is familiar but also new or unknown pathogens that could increase the likelihood of epidemics, especially considering low levels of COVID-19 vaccination in Russia and the general problems of Russian health care.

By the end of 2014, scientists were warning that global warming could turn Siberia into a “giant crater time bomb.” Massive craters appearing throughout Siberia were attributed to global warming, which also affected the permafrost. The thawing tundra was generating “fire ice,” gases that exploded to create the craters. 

Russian scientists believe that the Arctic slope and the permafrost contain huge amounts of methane hydrates that are now being released due to global warming. Areas like Lake Baikal as well as large energy projects, including the huge Bovanenkovo gas field on the Yamal Peninsula, began to be seen as potential hot spots for methane leaks and explosions. 

By 2015, these scientists were increasingly convinced that climate change was causing the explosions of these methane hydrates and that major energy facilities like the one at Yamal were at high risk, with other areas having a lower, but discernible risk factor. Indeed, by 2017 there were at least 10 known sinkholes or craters in the Yamal Peninsula as well as about 250 lakes and numerous offshore structures “which indicate similar phenomena.” Given the importance of the new Yamal pipeline for Sino-Russian economic and political relations, the consequences of an ever more likely disaster there are severe. 

For decades, nevertheless, Russia believed it would benefit from global warming, which could potentially ruin its adversaries while warming Siberia so that it could become prime agricultural land. As late as 2020, the Kremlin announced it would “use the advantages” of global climate change. 

Furthermore, since Moscow is continuing to operate nuclear power plants in the Arctic and has recently extended the aging Kola nuclear power plant’s oldest reactor, built in 1970,  to run till 2034, it does not take much imagination to envision the potential for a monumental disaster.  

Moreover, Russia uses the Arctic as a site for testing its nuclear weapons. The nuclear accidents of 2019, which took the lives of several nuclear scientists, only hint at the potential magnitude of what could happen. 

Not all Russians are eagerly marching toward climactic oblivion. Russian expatriate billionaire Andrey Melnichenko has emerged as a champion of nature-based solutions programs, arguing they can reduce environmental dangers. Melnichenko, who is sanctioned by the European Union and U.S., and lives in Dubai, proposed a nature-based solutions strategy during COP28 that’s aimed at solving some of our most pressing climate problems.

The billionaire with seemingly eccentric ideas made a splash by sponsoring a lavish pavilion at COP28 featuring calls for the revival of wooly mammoths using biotechnology and DNA samples harvested from frozen specimens in Siberia. He claims the idea was to draw public attention to nature-based solutions projects in such an unusual way and show how we can reduce emissions through programs like improved forest management, steppe and savannah restoration, smarter wildfire policy and tundra borderland remediation to mitigate permafrost thawing. 

According to United Nations Environment Program estimates, ideas such as these can reduce net emissions by 10-18 gigatons of CO2 equivalent per year, nearly one-third of all global anthropogenic emissions, by 2050. A Khaleej Times article written by Melnichenko notes that broad implementation of such projects “may exceed 150 [gigatons of] CO2 equivalent per year, an amount that is several times more than all emissions produced by humanity.”

It would be easy to dismiss Melnichenko and his ideas as those of an amateur, but in fact, his unorthodoxy belies an important insight. Critically, Russia’s vast taiga, together with the Amazon basin and algae in the ocean, is one of the principal oxygen-generating areas of the planet, and the release of methane from permafrost could fatally damage it.

Powerful figures in Russia’s government want to preserve and even extend the reliance on fossil fuels regardless of the mounting dangers, a policy that amounts to science denial. Nature-based solutions, including reforestation and tundra habitat remediation and restoration, may be part of the answer for the future, not just for Russia but also for Alaska and Canada — with or without the wooly mammoth roaming the Arctic expanses.

Stephen Blank, Ph.D. is a Foreign Policy Research Institute senior fellow and independent consultant focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia. He is a former professor of Russian national security studies and national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College.