Vladimir Potapov

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t one of its recent sessions the Presidium of the Russian State Council, which is chaired by the country’s President, focused the attention on problems of ecology. The participants discussed a comprehensive plan of measures to be taken before 2010 as well a complete package of documents, including the Ecological Doctrine of the Russian Federation, which already had been adopted by the Government. According to Governor of the Astrakhan region Anatoly Guzhvin, who headed the working group, which prepared these documents, Russia’s President gave his support to almost all nature-conservative initiatives but asked for a timeout with respect to just two of them. The case in point is to establish a National Ecology Council and to give a final approval to the Ecological Doctrine.
"The President does not reject this very idea, he simply asked for more time to study the question", explained Guzhvin. "The more so, as the Presidium requested the President to legalize the Ecological Doctrine by his executive order", he added. "As for the National Ecology Council, we ourselves have not proposed so far either its concept or statute. Besides, the President always has been very careful as regards establishing various structures, which, except their status, have no other advantages. If we are to create some structure, then, it should be really effective", said Anatoly Guzhvin.
To all appearances, the federal authorities decided to give a serious consideration to problems of ecology. "The fundamental decisions have been taken to restore the country’s nature-conservancy system destroyed in the last decade", noted Governor of the Kemerovo region Aman Tuleev commenting on the session of the State Council that he participated in.
The change in minds of the Russian political elite has a number of reasons. For one, there is no way to ignore the fact that the raw material orientation of the Russian economy not only reduces its total profitability and the country’s competitiveness as a whole. But it also makes it difficult to solve the most acute problems, including the ecological ones. "Altogether, it threatens the country’s security and puts in doubt the very possibility of people’s normal living conditions", said Aman Tuleev reflecting the general concern.

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The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 by participants of the U.N. Conference in the Japanese city of Kyoto. It secures the agreement of participants to control atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases that are leading to the global warming. Under this document, by 2008 to 2012 industrially developed countries should reduce their total emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 5.2 % against 1990. For each group of participating countries there are maximum upper limits of emissions that they have no right to exceed. For the first time in the history of international agreements on the environment protection the fulfillment of the document’s requirements is to promote market mechanisms. Thus, industrially developed countries, which are mostly responsible for polluting the atmosphere, should be paying out punitive compensation through investing in the nature-conservation structure. The Kyoto Protocol is a supplement to the U.N. Framework Convention of 1997 on climate change.

The Governor cited as an example the catastrophic consequences of coal-mine closures in the Kemerovo region in the 1990s to meet demands by the International Monetary Fund. "The mines were just flooded with no nature-conservative measures taken", recalled Tuleev. "Today people, who have nowhere else to go, have under their feet the wasteland that is collapsing and trickling with water". The lifespan in this region is shorter and the sickness rate is higher that in Russia on average.

Sludge storage at the Vysokogorsky Ore Mining and Processing Mill before and after mine reclamation

There is no doubt that restructuring the economy on the basis of high-technology, nature-protecting production facilities, of course, requires large expenses. New investors are needed. But the first step is to improve the Russian legal base.
The decision was made at the session of the State Council to introduce to the State’s Duma a draft of the federal law "On compensatory damage payments for negative impact on environment". The declared goal is to make sure that enterprises will get benefits from preventing ecological problems. It is quite possible that there will be a need to stimulate enterprises’ investments in ecology. It would be much better, if ecological payments were to be used by an enterprise itself for, say, its own modernization on the basis of ecological requirements. To this end much thought is being given to the idea of establishing an oversight body that would have to approve a program of such modernization and control the use of these funds. Members of the State Council also raised the necessity to form an ecology police and a single system for training ecology specialists.
The need to pay more attention to problems of ecology is also dictated by the position of the world community. Moscow just cannot ignore the very fact that the European Union ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Since Russian exporters are oriented to a large extent on the EU, it represents to them the beginning of changes in major sales markets. Demand for some products, for example, coal, will obviously decrease. In order to secure sales of other products, such as steel, aluminum, there will be a need for a thorough inventory so as to get prepared for consumers’ requirements as regards additional information about the power-input level, for instance. At the same time more demand is expected for "ecologically clean" products.
The necessity to ratify the Kyoto Protocol is being better understood in Russia now. According to the existing terms, this document will come into force after it is ratified by no less than 55 % of countries, which signed it. Another important condition: these countries should be accountable for at least 55 % of the total volume of carbonic acid emissions registered in 1990 (that year’s level was chosen as the starting basis). Following the U.S. categorical refusal (the American share of such emissions equals 36.1 %) to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, it has become much harder to meet this requirement. In this situation the date of this document coming into effect now, in fact, depends on Russia, which accounts for 17.4 % of emissions. Totally, the share of Russia and those countries, which ratified the Kyoto Protocol, amounts to 50.1 % of the world’ emissions of carbonic acid. It seems that most likely there will be no problem to gain 5 remaining percent necessary to complete the ratification process.


There are two groups of lobbyists of the Kyoto Protocol formed in Russia. Representatives of one of them point out that, in addition to strict quantitative restrictions, the Protocol also provides for "flexibility mechanisms". As for Russia, the country is most interested in a possibility of trading emission quotas. Since the level of pollution by Russian enterprises amounts to only 65 % as compared with the basic indicators of 1990, the proposed mechanism does not rule out the chance to make some profit on "selling clean air". Proponents of this option are counting on forming a quota-selling market as its infrastructure, in their opinion, is already taking shape. In this connection they are referring to the pilot start-up of bidding in the quota-pollution market that has already taken place in London. So far bid-and-asked quotations of one ton of the carbonic acid equivalent are close to 53 British pounds. This price for pollution rights many times exceeds almost all those predicted by Russian experts, which varied within $5 to $20 a ton. So, the amount of Russia’s potential revenue from selling unused quotas turns out to be so considerable that it will permit to start solving the most acute ecological problems.
At the same time, proponents of another opinion believe that nobody will be buying Russian quotas. However, when implementing energy-efficient projects it may become possible to get an accompanying product in the form of tons of carbonic acid tons not emitted into the atmosphere. And that is the essence of all this: the more power-saving projects are implemented, the higher the reserve of unused quotas. Precisely this approach makes the Kyoto Protocol a key document for solving specifically Russian domestic problems: reduction of the GDP’s power intensity, upgrading of efficiency of the country’s power-consuming industries and attraction of investments in its power engineering.
Debates on ratifying the Kyoto Protocol are still going on. But one thing is important: the majority of experts think that it would be useful to Russia to join the document, requirements of which meet the country’ Ecological Doctrine.
Now Russia finds itself in a situation, when its actions may become of a decisive importance on the global scale and when it may play a large positive role. The Kremlin would hardly wish to miss a chance like this.