A new initiative timed with the UN climate summit hopes to inspire journalists – just as their government’s reliance on fossil fuels is on the rise

Russia’s environment has it rough. For close to a century, successive leaders have attempted to bend nature to their will in the drive for economic growth.

Under Stalin, planners tried to make Siberian rivers run south rather than north, Khrushchev dreamed of growing corn in the Arctic circle and attempts were made under Brezhnev to unlock tight oil using nuclear explosives.

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Yet Russians hear relatively little about the treatment and exploitation of their own land, because of a lack of media coverage.

In a bid to improve environmental reporting in Russia, a group of journalists is attending a training project held to coincide with the UN climate change conference in Paris.

But the participants won’t just report on the summit itself, says Nina Zakharkina-Berezner, who runs D’Est, the organisation behind the initiative. She hopes to open Russians’ eyes to the way environmental problems are reported elsewhere through a series of seminars and exchanges with leading journalists from Le Monde, Radio France Internationale and La Croix.

‘Foreign agents’

Today, Russia’s economy has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, and the Kremlin has reacted to economic slowdown by cutting green subsidies.

At the same time, the chance draw attention to abuses has been severely compromised, with Putin attacking NGOs which campaign to protect the natural world by branding many of them “foreign agents”.



As Le Monde journalist Simon Roger notes, only “big stories make the national and international headlines” – such as the plan to build an oil pipeline near Lake Baikal, or to cut through Khimki forest for a new Moscow to St Petersburg road.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russian servicemen remove felled trees outside the town of Lukhovitsy in 2010. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

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One of the project’s participants, Nikita Kuzmin, has exposed the illegal felling of trees for the construction of mansions on the Curonian Spit, a narrow strip of land running from Kaliningrad to Klaipeda and a Unesco world heritage site.



Another, Maria Chernova, documented how illegal felling in Irkutsk province has been carried out with the connivance, if not wholesale approval, of the local police. “Any exposure is always a threat to corruption,” she says.

But the ability of civic activists to cry foul in the face of environmental degradation has come under threat. Of the roughly 100 NGOs designated as “foreign agents” by the Russian Ministry of Justice, around 20 focus on the environment. Their aims are many and far reaching: they protect wild pacific salmon in Russia’s far east (Sakhalin Environment Watch), have brought successful legal challenges against illegal logging in the Altai mountains (Gebler Ecological Society) and protect the rights of people suffering the ill-effects of radiation (For Nature – Chelyabinsk).

A report submitted to the Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights in October noted that the number of NGOs operating in Russia since the foreign agent law took effect in 2012 has decreased by a third.



Official harassment does not end there. For over 15 years, Nadezhda Kutepova of Planet of Hopes had stood up for the rights of radiation victims in her closed city of Ozersk, Chelyabinsk province. But, this summer, she was forced to flee the country with her three children after the Rossiya-1 channel ran a documentary accusing her of “industrial espionage”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, addresses the opening plenary session of the UN climate talks in Paris. Photograph: Planet Pix v/REX Shutterstock

Such persecution makes it all the more important that independent journalists can continue to work unimpeded and engage the public on environmental issues.

Gaining traction

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Despite the recent clampdown, reporters say environmental messages are slowly gaining traction in Russia. Angelina Davydova, a St Petersburg-based journalist who has been covering the beat since 2008, believes that they “have become far more important, both for the general public, and for the authorities and companies”, while she has witnessed “a growing number of civil society movements and initiatives”.

One key to encouraging local interest in the environment, she said, is to focus on local disputes over recycling, green spaces or new factories.

“Often, environmental stories are [ones] of access to natural resources, of local groups fighting against a big investor exploiting local resources and not taking account of the externalities of a production process,” says Davydova, who is also head of the German-Russian Bureau of Environmental Information and a co-organiser of the project.



The journalists remain hopeful that their reporting can make a difference, and say the slow instigation of much needed initiatives to mitigate against the effects of climate change show Russian authorities are not blind to the issue.

This year, St Petersburg approved an adaptation plan, which calls for better flood defences, and Davydova expects Moscow to follow suit, along with Kazan and Murmansk province. These measures come none too soon – particularly as Russia contains so much territory at extreme northern latitudes, where warming is faster than average.