By Valerie Volcovici
BAKU, Azerbaijan (Reuters) – Russia has included territories it occupies in Ukraine in its recent greenhouse gas inventory report to the United Nations, prompting protests from Ukrainian officials and activists at the COP29 climate summit this week. .
Moscow’s move comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin contemplates possible peace deal negotiations with incoming U.S. President Donald Trump that could decide the fate of vast swaths of territory.
“We see that Russia is using international platforms to legalize its actions, to legalize its occupation of our territory,” Ukraine’s Deputy Environment Minister Olga Yukhymchuk told Reuters.
He said Ukraine is in contact with officials at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN’s main climate body, to ask it to resolve the dispute.
Officials representing the Russian Foreign Ministry and the UNFCCC did not respond to requests for comment sent Thursday.
At issue is Russia’s National Inventory Report on greenhouse gas emissions for 2022, which Moscow submitted to the UNFCCC on November 8. In the presentation, reviewed by Reuters, Russia said it could only provide data for 85 of 89 of its territories “due to the lack of baseline data on land use in the territories of the regions of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the People’s Republic of Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, annexed in September 2022.”
Russia had already included emissions from the Ukrainian region of Crimea, annexed in 2014, in its latest reports submitted to the UNFCCC. He also included Crimea’s territorial development plans in a report to the UN Global Biodiversity Framework in 2020.
Ukraine’s Environment Minister Svitlana Grynchuk raised the issue in a speech to delegates at the COP29 summit earlier this week, saying Russia’s reporting on Ukrainian territories undermines the integrity of global climate efforts.
Yukhymchuk told Reuters that this concern is based on the risk of double counting of emissions in territories that together exceed the size of Portugal and Azerbaijan.
“It will take us to a point where we will not achieve any of our goals if we do not have adequate reporting under the Paris Agreement,” he said.
Nikki Reisch, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law, said the dispute reflected how geopolitical turmoil was diverting the world’s attention from the work of combating global warming.
“I think it’s a sign of the times,” Reisch said on the sidelines of the COP29 summit.
“We live in the midst of rampant conflict and that is certainly infecting these conversations.”
Christina Voigt, a law professor at the University of Oslo, said Russia’s reporting on Ukraine’s emissions violated Ukraine’s sovereignty and could be illegal.
“Claiming emissions may not be illegal, but claiming emissions as coming from your own territory, when in fact they are generated in the territory of another country, is a unilateral declaration that violates the international legal status of that territory,” Voigt said.
He said Russia’s claim on emissions from annexed lands could become even more problematic if Moscow eventually claims emissions reductions on these lands and offers them as offset credits to carbon markets.
“This would effectively be an illegal appropriation of property that belongs to the other State,” he stated.