Energy-rich Sakhalin island charts Russia’s course to greener future

People in Sakhalin like to say that everything in Russia begins on this Pacific island: each new day and new year and now, perhaps, a cleaner future for the world’s biggest energy exporter and fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

But while ecologists welcome the Kremlin’s growing attention to climate change, they fear its response will rely on statistical sleight of hand rather than tough reforms, and could become a bargaining chip in political rows with the West.

Sakhalin’s claim to be ahead of the rest of Russia is not quite correct – the Kamchatka peninsula is one time zone further east – but this energy-rich island 6,500km from Moscow is in the vanguard of the country’s response to climate change.

The regional government is now working to implement a Kremlin-approved plan to make Sakhalin carbon neutral by 2025, through the introduction of greener heating and transport systems and the launch of a carbon trading market on which companies will be able to buy and sell credits according to their emissions.

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It seems like a bold move for a remote region of 490,000 people whose economy is built on the energy industry, which boomed in the 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union brought global oil and gas firms charging in to tap its underground and subsea riches.

Yet officials insist the 2025 goal is achievable, thanks in large part to Sakhalin’s wilderness – an approach that mirrors a national plan to offset emissions by citing the carbon-absorbing capacity of Russia’s forests, which are the biggest in the world and contain about a fifth of the planet’s trees.

"We announced the target for Sakhalin after we analysed the data and saw it was pretty realistic – about 68 per cent of the island is covered in forest," says Dinara Gershinkova, a chief aide to Sakhalin's governor on climate issues.

“The gap between our emissions and absorption [of carbon] is not big – we don’t have to reduce emissions by 40 or 50 per cent but actually by about 10 per cent to reach neutrality – so these are good conditions for a pilot project. It means we’re not scaring businesses and they are ready take part in this programme.”

Shift to gas

Tsarist Russia banished prisoners to Sakhalin to build mines, and for generations coal has been an export earner as well as a major fuel used for heating here and on the neighbouring Kuril islands, which the Soviet Union took from Japan in 1945.

Now a large-scale shift to gas is planned for power stations and homes, and electric- and gas-powered cars and buses are appearing on the streets of the island’s capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, along with charging stations for electric vehicles.

A coal company is preparing to build a 16-turbine, 67-megawatt wind farm in eastern Sakhalin, and there are plans to create an environmentally friendly, high-tech town – currently dubbed Ecopolis – by 2030 near Korsakovo in the south, about 100km across the water from Japan’s northern Hokkaido island.

Sakhalin is learning from Tokyo’s decade of experience running an emissions credit market and is discussing a carbon capture scheme with a Japanese firm, highlighting the potential for international co-operation on green projects here even as Japan claims sovereignty over several of the tiny Kuril islands – where Russia wants to develop wind, wave and geothermal energy in the coming years.

“Sakhalin is a flagship,” says Gershinkova, who worked in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s administration before being sent to Sakhalin last year to oversee climate-related projects.

“Other regions are now expressing an interest in following Sakhalin’s lead on carbon neutrality and Putin has mentioned Sakhalin several times in this context. We’re not doing this in vain.”

Putin previously joked that global warming would allow Russians to spend less on fur coats and mused that it resulted from “cosmic changes, some invisible moves in the galaxy”, but recent comments suggest he now accepts that his country must modernise its industry and engage with the global debate on climate change.

Russia still envisages some potential benefits from a warmer climate – its Arctic sea routes becoming competition for the Suez Canal and arable lands expanding northwards – but alarm bells are ringing after massive forest fires in Siberia and some thawing of the permafrost that covers 65 per cent of the country.

Cop26

Putin will not attend the forthcoming UN climate change conference in Glasgow, apparently due to coronavirus concerns, but his announcement this month that Russia aims to be carbon neutral by 2060 will be a talking point at Cop26.

How Russia hopes to meet that goal is already under scrutiny, after Putin said the country's forests could absorb "several billion tonnes" of carbon dioxide, and deputy prime minster Viktoria Abramchenko put the annual figure at 2.5 billion tonnes of C02 – more than Russia's yearly total of greenhouse gas emissions.

It is also almost five times more than the country’s calculation for its carbon sink in 2019, stoking concerns that Russia – and other states – could burnish their environmental data not by slashing emissions but simply by reclassifying forests and marking up the volume of greenhouse gases they could theoretically absorb.

"This is how it works: first you declare some natural ecosystem your own, because ... it sits on your territory. Then you claim that because of this or that policy, it is taking up large amounts of carbon. Step three, count it as part of your net zero obligations," writes Wolfgang Knorr, a senior research scientist for physical geography and ecosystem science at Lund University in Sweden.

“Much easier to achieve than a daunting ‘real’ net zero task. Trick done, problem solved.”

There is much scientific debate over how to calculate the carbon-swallowing potential of forests, but Russia insists its emissions targets must take into account the “maximum possible absorptive capacity of forests and other ecosystems”.

Russia is also planning to use its vast forests as the basis of a carbon credit market, leasing tracts to firms that could plant more trees or prevent wildfires in their areas as a way to offset emissions from their core operations.

The credits could soften the blow of the EU's introduction of a carbon tax on imports from 2026, which some Russian industry bosses reportedly fear could cost exporters of carbon-intensive products such as steel and aluminium more than western sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 for its aggression against Ukraine.

Sanctions

Putin's climate envoy argues that such sanctions should be lifted from Russian energy firms, specifically state-controlled Gazprom, which earlier this year admitted that a damaged gas pipe had leaked some 2.7 million cubic metres of methane – a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

“We are being urged to reduce methane leakages and yet we have Gazprom under sanctions... Let’s take climate projects out of sanctions, so that Gazprom has access to green financing, access to technologies,” Ruslan Edelgeriyev said last week.

“We have had conflicts, we have conflicts and we will go on having conflicts, but the climate doesn’t care,” he told Bloomberg. “These two things don’t get along, sanctions and climate.”

Western business interests in Russia have dwindled as political relations have soured, but international firms are still a strong presence in Sakhalin, where the likes of ExxonMobil and Shell are major shareholders in big oil and gas projects.

"Their arrival had a big effect on life here," says Viktor Shcheglov, deputy director of the Sakhalin regional museum.

"The 1990s were chaos – the economy collapsing, companies going bust, high unemployment. By the mid-1990s something like 80 per cent of people here were on the poverty line and the United States and Japan were sending humanitarian aid," he recalls.

“Lots of people left the island. But when preparatory work started [for energy projects], new jobs appeared and people started getting paid decent money. When oil and gas income began to come in, it boosted the regional budget so infrastructure could be rebuilt and more jobs created. People here appreciated the positive changes.”

Gershinkova says the presence of foreign energy majors is also a “plus” for Sakhalin’s green reforms, because they understand the importance of the issue and the technical aspects of measuring and monitoring carbon emissions.

Campaigns

But if these corporate giants thought wealth and influence would give them carte blanche here, they had not reckoned with Sakhalin Environment Watch.

Founded in 1996 and run almost ever since by Dmitry Lisitsyn, SEW has held energy firms to account for their operations around Sakhalin, leading campaigns that forced them to stop dumping waste into the Sea of Okhotsk and to scrap plans for a pipeline through a feeding ground for rare Western Pacific grey whales.

The Kremlin may now be changing its tune on global warming but, according to Natalia Lisitsyna, SEW's lawyer and Dmitry's wife, environmental protection in Russia has been significantly eroded during Putin's two decades in power.

“Russian law was much stronger and stricter than it is now, and public involvement was much more broader – at every stage [of a project] there were public meetings and discussions, anyone could look at planning documents and make points,” she says.

“You could change something through public hearings, an ecological inspection by state agencies or an appeal to prosecutors. Those instruments are less effective now, so increasingly we have to go straight to court to make our case.”

Lisitsyn, who has just returned to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk from a 67,000-hectare wildlife refuge on the island that SEW helped to create and now works to protect, says global warming is already bringing more frequent and more damaging cyclones to the region and aiding the spread of the voracious European spruce bark beetle.

"If warming continues at its current speed, then in about 20 years there may be no spruce trees left on Sakhalin," warns Lisitsyn, who in 2011 received a prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize from then US president Barack Obama.

He sees great potential for geothermal energy on the Kuril islands and some scope for wind power on Sakhalin, but thinks the greatest short- and mid-term gains will come from the switch from coal to gas, which will cut carbon emissions and end open-cast mining that is “hugely harmful to [salmon] spawning rivers, forests and people living nearby”.

Having led the fight to protect Sakhalin’s nature during its energy boom, Lisitsyn is hopeful for its carbon-neutral future.

“I believe the overall effect of moving to cleaner energy will be of great benefit,” he says, “both to Sakhalin’s wildlife and to the human habitat on our island.”