People walk along Moscow’s Red Square, with St Basil’s Cathedral seen through heavy smog. Photo: Reuters

Russia has rebuffed calls for a more ambitious plan to cut its carbon dioxide emissions after environmentalists branded its current pledge inadequate and backward-looking.

The world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, Russia pledged in March to keep its emissions at 25-30 per cent below the level it generated in 1990, the year before the Soviet Union and its vast industrial complex collapsed.

Green groups say the pledge, made ahead of a global warming summit in Paris in December, is far too easy for Moscow to fulfil because 1990 was a time when Soviet industry was a notoriously prolific polluter whereas Russia’s industrial base today is much smaller. A group of four global climate research groups, known collectively as Climate Action Tracker, have rated Russia’s pledge as ‘inadequate’, worse than the ‘medium’ assessment they have handed out to other big polluters such as China, the United States and the European Union.

But President Vladimir Putin’s top adviser on global warming dismissed such criticism on the sidelines of a Moscow meeting of the UN International Panel on Climate Change this week.

Russia is world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases

“It is their opinion, it does not reflect anything and is not objective,” Alexander Bedritsky told Reuters, saying Russia would stick to its current plan.

“They can say whatever they want, but our commitments are based on around 70 scenarios of how the climate system will be developing.”

“It is unfair to compare the Kremlin’s commitments to those of developed economies such as the United States or European Union member states because Russia is still an economy in transition”, he added.

With its gigantic reserves of oil, gas and coal, Russia emits 2 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent a year, making it the fourth largest producer of greenhouse gases after the United States, China and India.

According to Greenpeace, 85 per cent of CO2 equivalent emissions in Russia come from its energy industry.

They and other green groups say Russia’s current programme is far too unambitious because the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse in 1990 – the year the programme is pegged to – and its greenhouse gas emissions therefore fell sharply as the country’s industrial base shrank.

“This pledge is a tragedy, a catastrophe,” said Vladimir Chuprov, head of Greenpeace’s energy programme.

“With this 25-30 per cent commitment they are basical-ly saying: ‘Guys, we’re staying in the 20th century with our carbon-centered technology’.”