This year unprecedented heat waves scorched their way across Europe, but many in the Russian political elites hope that climate change will benefit the Russian economy in the long run, opening up new transport routes and creating new agricultural zones. In his book Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change, shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2022, Professor Thane Gustafson presents the first full-length study of Russia as a prime source, a beneficiary and a victim of the climate crisis.
Join Gustafson for a Zoom conversation about the environment, Russia’s future, and where these two issues collide. He will discuss these themes with Professor Mary E. Edwards, an expert on Northern ecosystems and permafrost landscapes.
This is an online event.
Russia has the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas, earning a third of the country’s income. When exports are going well, Russia thrives. When times are hard, the economy and society suffer. Although awareness of climate change has grown among the Russian elites and public in recent years, any meaningful policy changes are yet to be seen. Russia has fallen into the trap of the ‘resource curse’.
The trends towards decarbonisation that the world desperately needs could undermine the very foundations of the Russian economy and weaken the state. Yet staying on the same path will cause catastrophic damage to Russia as well as social and political upheavals at home and far beyond.
Temperatures in Russia are rising faster than anywhere in the world. Swathes of permafrost are rapidly defrosting into a ticking time bomb, wildfires rage across the forests of Siberia and the Far East, and Southern Russia faces a biblical deluge of flooding that drives thousands from their homes. Away from home, the spending of Russian petrodollars causes unimaginable violence and suffering as higher revenues are poured into military spending. Nowhere is this more evident than in the invasion of Ukraine. Europe wants to wean itself off Russian hydrocarbons, but will the European public tolerate the destabilising of their own economies – and the tightening of their own purses?
Whatever the answers are to the Russian climate question, they are wrapped up in a complex web of economic, geopolitical and technological issues. In his talk, Thane Gustafson will untangle the threads and discuss some of the most important questions facing our world today.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Thane Gustafson, Professor of Government at Georgetown University, has spent 40 years studying and traveling in Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Former Soviet Union. He teaches and writes on the political economy of Russia and Europe. Professor Gustafson’s latest book is Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change, which appeared at the end of 2021, with Harvard University Press and has been nominated for the Pushkin House Book Prize. His previous book, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe (Harvard, October 2020), was awarded the Marshall Shulman Prize for the best book on Russia that year. An earlier work, Wheel of Fortune: the Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Harvard, October 2012), was described by Foreign Affairs as “a superb book… the single most revealing work on Russian politics and economics published in the last several years.”
Formerly a professor at Harvard University and a political analyst at the Rand Corporation, Professor Gustafson holds a BS from the University of Illinois in political science and chemistry, and a PhD in government from Harvard University.
Mary E. Edwards is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton. Currently, she serves as UK representative to Terrestrial Working Group of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC). Recently, she has developed several collaborations on environmental change with Russian researchers in Siberia and the Russian Far East and co-leads the UK-Russia research group, DIMA. Mary’s interests are centred on global and regional environmental change: understanding climate-driven and human-driven changes in landscape, vegetation, and ecosystem processes over a range of timescales. She is particularly interested in Northern ecosystem processes and permafrost landscapes – how these intersect with climate change, the carbon cycle and human systems. The main geographic regions in which she works are the Arctic and Subarctic of Siberia, Alaska, northwest Canada and Europe, plus the UK and Madagascar.