Climate change in Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Climate change in Russia is not a distant forecast. In July 2010, peat fire smoke filled Moscow's air so thickly that visibility dropped below 300 metres across much of the region. That same summer turned out to be the hottest in the region for five centuries. Temperatures in Moscow hit 38.2 degrees Celsius, the highest reading since records began 130 years earlier. There were 33 consecutive days above 30 degrees in the city. By the end of the season, around 14,000 people had died from heat and air pollution, more than 10,000 square kilometres had burned, and economic losses reached roughly 15 billion US dollars.

  What made that summer possible, and why is Russia so exposed? Russia is the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, yet over the past century it has also been warming at a rate nearly twice the global average. The country holds vast Arctic territories, enormous peatlands, the world's largest boreal forest, and permafrost covering much of its northern half. Each of these systems is under pressure. The questions this documentary will explore are how that warming is already reshaping the land, who is most at risk, and what Russia is actually doing about it.

• 2. A Country Warming Faster

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  Over the last 100 years, Russia's average temperature has risen by around 1.29 degrees Celsius. The global average over the same period, according to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, was 0.74 degrees. That gap is not accidental. Higher northern latitudes warm more rapidly than tropical or temperate regions, and Russia sits mostly in those latitudes.

  The western regions of Russia have been rising by 0.4 to 0.5 degrees Celsius every decade. The eastern parts of the country have seen the most intense warming overall, according to the Inter-Agency Commission of the Russian Federation on Climate Change. In the Arctic, temperatures have been rising at double the global average rate: 0.2 degrees per decade over the past 30 years.

  The warming has not been uniform across the calendar year either. It has been most pronounced in winter and spring. The annual number of frost days has fallen over the past century, while the occurrence of extremely hot summer days has risen sharply. Between 1980 and 2012, the number of summer seasons with extremely hot days doubled compared to the preceding three decades. A side effect has been a longer growing season across much of the country, with spring arriving earlier and autumn beginning later.

  Precipitation patterns have also shifted. Between 1976 and 2006, Russia saw an average increase in annual precipitation of 7.2 millimetres per decade. Spring precipitation in Siberia and western Russia rose by 16.8 millimetres per decade. Eastern regions, however, experienced a general decrease. From 1900 to 2005, precipitation had already been increasing across northern Europe and northern and central Asia, setting up the conditions for the regional divergence now underway.

• 3. Ice, Snow, and Permafrost

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  Satellite observations over the last 20 years have recorded a steady decline in Arctic sea ice. That decline matters because ice reflects solar radiation back into space. Less ice means less of the sun's energy is reflected, more is absorbed by the ground, and surface air temperatures rise further. This feedback loop is already accelerating warming in the Russian Arctic.

  River ice in the Baltic Sea drainage basin of Russia has also retreated. Over the past 50 years, the duration of river ice cover in that area has shortened by between 25 and 40 days on average. Ice cover thickness dropped by 15 to 20 percent over the second half of the 20th century.

  Glaciers have fared worse. Across Russia, they shrank by between 10 and 70 percent over the second half of the 20th century. The wide range reflects local climatic variations, but no direction is positive.

  Permafrost, ground frozen for two or more years, underlies most of Russia's Arctic territory, sometimes to depths of several hundred metres. Thawing permafrost does not just alter the landscape. In May 2020, thawing permafrost at Norilsk-Taimyr Energy's Thermal Power Plant No. 3 caused an oil storage tank to collapse. The rupture flooded local rivers with 21,000 cubic metres, or 17,500 tonnes, of diesel oil. It has been described as the second-largest oil spill in modern Russian history. That single event illustrated what engineers and climate scientists have warned about: the ground on which Russia's northern infrastructure stands is no longer reliable.

• 4. Forests, Peatlands, and Fire

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  The taiga, the vast coniferous forest biome stretching from western to eastern Russia, is one of the planet's largest carbon sinks. Pines, spruce, and larch dominate its tree cover. Much of the stored carbon sits not in the trees themselves but in peatlands and wetlands beneath them.

  Peat is compressed organic matter that has accumulated over millennia. When peatlands dry out, they become fire-prone. According to Wetlands International, 80 to 90 percent of the 2010 Russian wildfires came from dewatered peatlands. Dewatered bogs are estimated to account for 6 percent of human-caused global warming emissions worldwide. When peat burns, it releases that stored carbon directly into the atmosphere, and peat fire smoke carries particulates that are more harmful to human health than standard forest fire smoke.

  In the tundra to the north of the taiga, the ecological pressure runs differently. Tundra vegetation, composed of shrubs, sedges, mosses, lichens, and grasses, is adapted to low temperatures and a short growing season. Warmer and longer growing seasons are making the tundra more productive, but that productivity is setting the stage for boreal forest to push northward into former tundra. At the same time, the southern edge of the boreal forest is expected to retreat northward as increasing temperatures, drought stress, more frequent fires, and new insect species make conditions there less hospitable.

  Following the 2010 fires, peatland restoration efforts near Moscow have reduced the risk of severe fires returning to that area, offering at least one example where targeted intervention has shifted the risk profile.

• 5. Health and Human Costs

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  The 2010 heatwave in western Russia killed around 14,000 people through heat and air pollution combined. That figure sits alongside a 25 percent crop failure that year. The human cost of that single extreme season was large enough to register as a national emergency.

  Heat is not the only climate-related health threat. In the Moscow region, higher average daily temperatures earlier in the year have already caused a rapid increase in malaria cases. Mosquitoes carrying malaria are expected to extend their range northward as temperatures continue to rise through the 21st century. Tick-borne diseases are also projected to increase across Russia as ticks shift their distribution in response to warming. Sandfly-borne diseases, including Leishmaniasis, could expand into Russia and Europe as higher average temperatures make transmission viable at northern latitudes where it was previously too cold.

  Floods add another layer of risk. Rising precipitation averages, rapid snowmelt, and glacier retreat all raise the probability of flooding across different parts of the country. The 2010 and 2012 droughts caused grain prices to spike for rye, wheat, and barley, illustrating how climate extremes translate quickly into food price shocks felt by ordinary households.

  The IPCC outlined mitigation strategies following the 2006, 2003, and 2010 heatwaves in Europe and Russia. Those strategies include increasing vegetation cover in cities, raising urban albedo, improving home insulation, and building better systems to communicate heat risk to the public.

• 6. Indigenous Communities at the Margins

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  Around 2.5 million people live in Russia's Arctic zone, and the majority of Russia's indigenous people are concentrated in Arctic and Siberian regions. For centuries, communities in Siberia and the Far East have structured their lives around reindeer herding and fishing, both of which depend on predictable seasonal patterns.

  Frequent winter thaws have disrupted reindeer herding among the Sami and Nenets peoples. When temperatures dip and then briefly rise during winter, rain falls on snow and refreezes, forming ice layers on the ground. Reindeer cannot dig through ice to reach the lichens below, cutting off their primary food source. Researchers have noted that even small climate shifts affect the nomadic life of the Nenets in measurable ways.

  Marine animal populations have also declined, damaging traditional fisheries that these communities have relied on across generations. The Center for the Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North has specifically noted that Russia lacks any formal program for calculating the potential impact of climate change on indigenous zones. Many Indigenous and Environmental Movements in Russia have been declared foreign agents by the Russian Federation, a designation that constrains their ability to advocate for climate adaptation measures.

• 7. Agriculture and the Economy

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  Russia's agricultural sector is deeply exposed to climate variability. The overall yield of grain crops is expected to decrease by 17 percent by 2050. By 2030, prices of grain crops are estimated to rise significantly: 29 percent for wheat, 33 percent for rice, and 47 percent for maize. Those figures matter well beyond Russia's borders, since Russia is a major exporter of wheat and other grains.

  In May 2024, an unexpected frost struck key agricultural regions within what is known as the black soil belt, including the Voronezh, Tambov, and Lipetsk regions. The frost damaged approximately 265,000 hectares of crops in Voronezh alone. The damage reduced wheat harvest forecasts and pushed international wheat prices to their highest levels since August 2023. Events like this illustrate that climate risk for Russia is not limited to long-term trends. It includes sudden cold snaps outside the typical frost window, which are becoming more disruptive as seasons shift.

  One analysis published by scholars at major universities, titled Russia in a Changing Climate, noted that Russia is currently focused on the war in Ukraine and relies on oil and natural gas revenues to fund that effort. Oil and gas wealth also funds Russian social welfare programs. Climate-related economic damage is real, but the country's political priorities have not aligned with treating it as the central concern.

• 8. Agreements and the Gap Between Them

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  Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2009, with the agreement coming into force on the 16th of February 2010. Russia's target for the 2008-2012 period was to hold greenhouse gas emissions to no more than the 1990 baseline, a 0% change. The actual result was a reduction of 36.3 percent below that baseline. That reduction, however, was not driven by climate policy. It was a consequence of the earlier collapse in economic output following the end of the Soviet Union. When six G8 countries indicated willingness to halve global emissions by 2050 in 2007, Russia, along with the United States under the Bush administration, did not agree.

  In 2019, Russia announced it would implement the 2015 Paris Agreement. Under the Paris Agreement framework, Russia's Nationally Determined Contribution targets a 70 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 relative to 1990 levels, accounting for the absorptive capacity of forests and ecosystems. Russia's approach leans heavily on forests as a carbon sink and on proactive risk reduction measures such as dam construction against floods.

  Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific body that measures national government actions against the Paris Agreement's goals, assessed Russian climate action as "critically insufficient." The tracker also noted that available data from Russia is scarce and out of date. Meanwhile, around 56 percent of the Russian population lacks trust in the country's agencies on environmental matters, and 35 percent of the population has said they are willing to participate in environmental protests. Those figures suggest a public that is skeptical of official responses, even as the ecological changes the 2010 Moscow heatwave made visible continue to intensify.