How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis

/russia-climate-migration-crisis.html

  • How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russia-climate-migration-crisis.html

    Around the world, climate change is becoming an epochal crisis, a nightmare of drought, desertification, flooding and unbearable heat, threatening to make vast regions less habitable and drive the greatest migration of refugees in history. But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate. There is plenty of reason to think that those places will also receive an extraordinary influx of people displaced from the hottest parts of the world as the climate warms. Human migration, historically, has been driven by the pursuit of prosperity even more so than it has by environmental strife. With climate change, prosperity and habitability — haven and economic opportunity — will soon become one and the same.

    And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation. It is positioned farther north than all of its South Asian neighbors, which collectively are home to the largest global population fending off displacement from rising seas, drought and an overheating climate. Like Canada, Russia is rich in resources and land, with room to grow. Its crop production is expected to be boosted by warming temperatures over the coming decades even as farm yields in the United States, Europe and India are all forecast to decrease. And whether by accident or cunning strategy or, most likely, some combination of the two, the steps its leaders have steadily taken — planting flags in the Arctic and propping up domestic grain production among them — have increasingly positioned Russia to regain its superpower mantle in a warmer world.

    [...]

    Russia’s agricultural dominance, says Rod Schoonover, the former director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council and a former senior State Department analyst under the Obama and Trump administrations, is “an emergent national security issue” that is “underappreciated as a geopolitical threat.”

    [...]

    And as climate change increasingly drives mass migration, the eventual pressure from the population to the south is quite real. Northeastern China, a report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council warns, will face water shortages and droughts that could drive its population into Russia “in large numbers,” potentially unsettling the entire region. Chinese migrants might be pulled into the Russian Far East by economic opportunities today, the council stated, but by as soon as 2030 the dynamic could flip to one in which they will instead be pushed out of China for lack of basic resources.

    And it won’t just be from China. Water shortages and more frequent droughts across Central Asia and Mongolia and south as far as India could push large numbers of people north. A 2015 study by Russian demographers published in The Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences looked at how unabated climate change would force the “resettlement of millions” of Vietnamese, many of whom might also come to Russia, as sea levels inundate the Mekong Delta by the end of this century.

    If there is any lesson to be learned from the instability that has already been caused by climate-driven migration around the world, whether drought-stricken Guatemalans at the U.S. border or Syrians pressing into Europe, it’s that a strategy of accommodating migrants would almost certainly be more to Russia’s benefit than one that attempts to keep them out. Accommodation, an abundance of migration research shows, stands a better chance of preserving Russia’s own sovereignty while improving the stability of its surrounding regions; exclusion is likely to lead to endless conflict and chaos on its borders, which risks spilling across in destabilizing ways.

    #climat #agriculture #migration #géopolitique #Russie #Chine #Asie_centrale #Inde