Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations

Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations

Statement by Grigory Karasin, Chairperson of the Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs, at the Parliamentary Hearing at the United Nations “Making good on climate change commitments: The people vs. organized interests”

Mme. Chair,

Colleagues,

Russia is an active participant in the international climate process, both in terms of its contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and in terms of its efforts to achieve the universality of the climate regime under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In September 2019, we signed the resolution on adopting the Paris Agreement. Thus, our state became a full-fledged Party to the Agreement.

It is particularly encouraging that the remainder of the Paris Agreement Implementation Guidelines was endorsed during the Session of the Conference on Climate Change held in Glasgow last November.

The priority is to achieve, roughly in the middle of the century, the goal of carbon neutrality enshrined in the Agreement and to keep the global average temperature goal of the Paris Agreement in the range of 2–1.5ºC.

We believe that strict adherence to the provisions of the Agreement is required in future work.

Therefore, over the past fifteen years, there has been a significant gap between Russia’s GDP growth rate and the dynamics of greenhouse gas emissions: particularly, GDP grew by 70% while the growth of greenhouse gas emissions was only 11%.

In November 2020, President signed the Decree on the National Goal of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030. Their level should not exceed 70% of the 1990 level. It is planned to achieve this by implementing state programs to reduce emissions, introducing new technologies, implementing measures to improve energy efficiency and develop renewable energy sources.

In accordance with the Agreement and the mentioned Presidential Decree, the Strategy for Socioeconomic Development of Russia with Low Greenhouse Gas Emissions up to 2050 was approved.

In other words for us it is an important and difficult task. Russia will hold emissions at the same level for a long time. In this way, we are largely offsetting emissions growth in other countries and regions of the world.

Thank you.