ProPublica: “The Big Thaw: How Russia could dominate a Warming World”

A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm; only the southernmost stretches along the Chinese and Mongolian borders, including around Dimitrovo, have been temperate enough to offer workable soil. But as the climate has begun to warm, the land — and the prospect for cultivating it — has begun to improve. Twenty years ago, Dima says, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter. Across Eastern Russia, wild forests, swamps and grasslands are slowly being transformed into orderly grids of soybeans, corn and wheat. It’s a process that is likely to accelerate: Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.

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The lyrics to Russia’s modern anthem suggest that at least some of its leaders have anticipated this moment: Wide spaces for dreams and for living are opened for us by the coming years. As if to fulfill that vision — and perhaps with the expectation of needing more land to execute his climate ambitions — Vladimir Putin declared in 2013 that the remaking of Russia’s East is our national priority for the entire 21st century, and that the goals that have to be attained are unprecedented in their scope. In laying out that ambition, he surely had history in mind. There was the outpost Russia built at the Sea of Okhotsk in the 1700s; efforts to drive out Chinese settlers of the Qing dynasty in the 1800s; the founding of the Jewish Autonomous Region, which ultimately brought as many as 40,000 Yiddish-speaking Jews to the area around Birobidzhan, in 1934; and even the longstanding banishment of workers and prisoners alike to Siberia and the Far East under Stalin and afterward.

Abrahm Lustgarten

While most countries are bracing for the damaging effects of global warming, or are already struggling with extreme heat or extreme cold events, Russia is making long-term plans to benefit from this warming trend. It controls after all the largest land area in the world and one of the least populated, which could become a prime destination for tens of millions of climate refugees in coming decades, and a huge food producer for those staying behind. The thinning ice in the Arctic is already allowing icebreakers to sail the Northern Sea Route in the middle of winter, opening huge commercial opportunities for Russian ports in the far north. In upcoming negotiations to agree upon global mitigation measures and stricter targets for emissions, Russia may prove the most stubborn opposer of coordinated actions.

Harvesting equipment at work outside Vladivostok, Russia, a port on the Sea of Japan. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

When Europe and the United States imposed sanctions on Russia after the downing of a Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine in 2014, Russia countered by imposing sanctions on European imports. It seemed self-punishing at first, but the move was meant to give Russia’s own domestic food producers an opening and prod them to fill the supply gap. When Putin addressed his Federal Assembly the following December, he boldly proclaimed Russia would soon be “the largest world supplier” of healthful foods, referring to his goal of keeping Russian foods mostly GMO-free. By 2018, Putin’s sanctions had paid enormous dividends: Since 2015, Russia’s wheat exports jumped 100%, to about 44 million tons, surpassing those of the United States and Europe. Russia is now the largest wheat exporter in the world, responsible for nearly a quarter of the global market. Russia’s agricultural exports have jumped sixteenfold since 2000 and by 2018 were worth nearly $30 billion, all by relying largely on Russia’s legacy growing regions in its south and west. In Africa, Putin told attendees of the Russia-Africa Economic Forum held in Sochi last fall, We are now exporting more agricultural products than weapons.

There are however several possible ways for this scenario to fail. Russia has attempted forced settlement of these lands for centuries, with little success. Even as the climate softens in those wide deserted northern plains, convincing migrants to stay may depend on economic incentives and cultural factors such as acceptance of people arriving from widely different backgrounds. A more unexpected solution comes from Greg Egan’s short story Perihelion Summer, where in the face of climate disruption people take refuge on floating habitats in the Southern Pacific. I don’t think we should underestimate technological solutions, especially as the crisis grows more dire.