Russia on the pathways to carbon neutrality: forks on roadmaps

Abstract

In its 2023 Climate Doctrine, Russia officially committed to carbon neutrality before 2060. However, on the roadmap fork to climate neutrality Russia’s Low Carbon Strategy chose the 2F (Forest First) pathway with the dominance of the natural solutions in the LULUCF sector and with a moderate decline or even growth (industry and agriculture) in other sectors. This paper focuses on a discussion of the roadmap to carbon neutrality. The roadmapping approach relies on a system of interconnected models for setting the scale of low carbon technologies and practices deployment. The paper concludes that excessive reliance on the 2F pathway is unrealistic, and only the Forest Last family of scenarios, which focuses on substantial reduction of GHG emissions across all sectors, is able to bring Russia to carbon neutrality in 2060. The paper also presents indicators to assess emission reductions by major sectors and discusses the need to reinforce the five pillars to support this pathway: technologies; regulations and programmes; incentives and financing; institutes; and human capital. These five pillars are required to effectively address three basic models of decisions-making (satisficing, optimization, and system transformation).