Just a few days ago the Russian President as a Chair of the Governmental Commission on Modernisation outlined the key environmental challenges for development of the Russian economy. Luckily, mitigation of climate change impacts and green energy have finally caught attention of Russian top-level decision-makers.
As an economy-in-transition Russia makes all possible efforts to reshape its behemoth resource-based economy into something new. Modernisation is probably the most popular word in Russian political vocabulary nowadays, especially accompanied with such words as "eco-", "ecological" or "environmental".
Yes, environmental concerns have been put forward by the Russian authorities recently. Not least of all because of last summer's uncontrollable forest fires that showed inability of the government to cope with urgent environmental hazards. The recent disaster in Japan added more fuel to that fire. All this made common Russian people to become more environmentally-concerned. And we should not forget about the forthcoming presidential elections in Russia in March 2012. To please the growing public demand for environmental safety, the Russian government has finally decided to do something.
In his opening speech at the latest session of the Governmental Commission on Modernisation, which was held on June 27, 2011, the President Dmitry Medvedev drew attention of the Russian high-level officials to the challenges in the field of environmental protection, cleaner energy and climate change mitigation that need to be addressed in order to make the national economy greener and, thus, more competitive. Among these challenges are:
1. Development of environmental monitoring system from the space, particularly for obtaining the up-to-date information about forest fires, ice-melting processes in the Arctic and functioning of nuclear power plants.
2. Promotion of renewable energy sources that make less than 1 % in total national electricity production at the moment.
3. Introduction of new fuel standards and replacement of public transport vehicles in Russian cities to hybrid and electric cars. More than two thirds of Russians regularly use public transport. What Russia can already boast is a relatively high (13 %) share of electrified means of transport (trams, trolleybuses, metro) in the total passenger turnover (Source: http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b10_12/IssWWW.exe/Stg/d02/18-07.htm ).
If the programme of the President is put into practice, this figure may significantly increase in the future.
4. Deeper involvement of Russian business into international carbon trading. This topic has suddenly got very hot. Russia has still a great surplus, which could be traded through Kyoto mechanisms. Russian business, at first inspired with the idea of additional green investments through carbon projects, has little by little lost its interest in the scheme, primarily because of the governmental heel-dragging. The national procedure for approval of carbon projects was designed in 2009, almost 2 years after the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol entered into force. And only this year the first 33 Russian projects have been officially registered. There is only one year and a half left till the first period of the Kyoto protocol ends. Suddenly Moscow has remembered that there are still millions of CO2 as an untapped emission reduction potential (or in other words, millions of euro waiting). 'We are losing both time and potential investors', - noted the President. Well, better late than never…
5. Further development of nuclear power. Sadly, but Russia sees nuclear power as a climate-friendly source of energy that could partly substitute fossil fuels. It was noted, however, that Russia will continue its work on the improvement of nuclear safety and radioactive waste storage. Meanwhile, the results of the recent poll, organized by Harris Interactive Inc (USA) and Japanese newspaper "Asahi", showed that 52 % of the Russians do not approve of the nuclear initiatives of the government.
Source: http://www.anti-atom.ru/ab/node/2595
I would like to conclude by Dmitry Medvedev's words, who said: 'All the fine and worthy words we speak about the environment are worth nothing at all if they are not given real form and substance as actual state innovation and environmental development projects, and have the business community’s essential support, what’s more". This is our top priority today", he added. (Quoted from http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/2470)
The innovative green approaches to modernization of the economy, introduction of new cleaner technologies, environmental responsibility of business… It sounds so right, isn't it? Apart from one tiny moment, actually. I do hope that these really 'fine and worthy words' are not just a part of the political campaign and will be converted into real actions in a post-2012 period (at this point I've suddenly heard an echo from Copenhagen 2009).
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Sebastian Moll 
