Russia’s Amazon

The “taiga” is twice as big and just as threatened

By Paul Greenberg, Safina Center Writer In Residence | Senior Fellow

Lake in taiga” by peupleloup is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse

When exactly will the forest end? I had this thought 30-odd years ago while crossing the Russian taiga on the Trans-Siberian Railroad from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk. For hours and then days, the massive boreal aggregation of pines and firs, hemlocks and spruces strobed past the train’s windows — a veritable ocean of green that seemed to defy all boundaries of what I imagined an intact ecosystem looked like.

I thought again of the endless-seeming taiga this month as Russia embarked on what could be an endless-seeming war. With the country effectively severed from Western commerce there is a real risk that it will lean even more heavily on its forests. And if this happens, Russia could quickly transform from a carbon sink into a planet toaster.

This is already happening with Russia’s oil. Before the war, oil accounted for around half of the country’s exports to the tune of $340 billion. With 106 billion barrels still in the ground this reserve will increasingly be Russia’s most important avenue to non-ruble currency. China, the energy-thirsty giant next door, is surely eyeing this possibility.

But even more troubling than an accelerated using up of Russia’s oil reserves is the specter of the country cashing out its forests. During the same month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a paper in the journal Nature reported that the Amazon rain forest was reaching a critical “tipping point” and could soon spiral down into a dried-out savannah. At more than 12 million square kilometers, The Russian taiga is nearly double the size of the Amazon. Even before the war in Ukraine began, a devastating war against the taiga was in progress. Twelve million hectares of it are being cut down every year. In a world where Russia’s supplies China with half of its wood, it’s likely we’ll see even more of the taiga go into Chinese sawmills in the years to come.

Prior to the war there was hope that Russia could transition into something other than just a grab bag of oil and wood. Information technology had risen to be 2.9% of the country’s GDP, comparable with its energy sector. Financial services went from basically non-existent at the fall of the Soviet Union to more than 4% of the country’s output and agricultural sophistication have led to a more than doubling of Russia’s ability to grow wheat and other cereals. In fact, prior to the war, Russia was the largest exporter of wheat in the world.

Now, all of that is in question.

What will happen if Russia slips back into a primitive, raw materials economy? It’s a hugely important question, one that is lost in the shuffling of geopolitics. Bringing the country back into the climate conversation is critical for the future of the planet. I would hope that whatever end game the war in Ukraine takes, the issue of Russia’s forests and all its other natural resources remain squarely in the spotlight of those deciding the next steps.