How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis
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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This could present an extraordinary opportunity for the world’s northernmost nations — but only if they figure out how to stem their own population decline while accommodating at least some of a monumental population push at their borders. Take, for example, Canada: It is flush with land as well as timber, oil, gas and hydropower, and it has access to 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. It has a stable, incorrupt democracy. And as the climate warms, Canada will move into the ecological sweet spot for civilization, benefiting from new Arctic transportation routes as well as an expanded capacity for farming. But there are only 38 million people in Canada, and Canadians are dying at a faster rate than they are being born.
Burke’s research suggests climate change will, by 2100, make Canadians two and a half times richer in terms of per capita G.D.P. than they would be if the planet were not warming. Canada may be able to seize that opportunity only if it welcomes a lot more people.
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Russia has been explicit about its intention to come out ahead as the climate changes; in its national action plan on climate released in January, it called on the country to “use the advantages” of warming and listed Arctic shipping and extended growing seasons among things that would shower “additional benefits” on the nation. Russia may be no better positioned, politically speaking, to welcome large numbers of migrants than the U.S. or Canada; in fact, xenophobia is probably even more prevalent there. But how it tackles migration and its own demographic challenges will have tremendous consequences for the U.S. and the rest of the world. Russia has always wanted to populate its vast eastern lands, and the steady thawing there puts that long-sought goal within reach. Achieving it could significantly increase Russia’s prosperity and power in the process, through the opening of tens of millions of acres of land and a flourishing new agricultural economy.
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In late October I spoke on a video call with Sergei Karaganov, founder of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and an influential adviser to Russian presidents, including Putin. Karaganov, who is normally pictured in suit and tie but who also describes himself as a hunter, sat in the pine-walled dining room of his dacha an hour and a half outside Moscow, where he was isolating to avoid Covid-19. Behind him an enormous bear skin was stretched out on the wall next to the bust of a six-point elk.
Russia needs so much labor in the east, he told me, that it has even contemplated flying workers in from India: “We think about the lower hundreds of thousands.”
There is an underlying sense, though, that sooner or later there will be more human capital available than Russia knows what to do with. Asian Russia sits atop a continent with the largest global population, including not just the Chinese but also nearly two billion South Asians — from the flooding Mekong Delta and Bangladesh to the sweltering plains of India — many of whom will inevitably be pushing northward in search of space and resources as the climate gets hotter and sea levels continue to rise. Russia is “not willing to bring in too many Chinese,” Karaganov said. “But when it comes, it will come from there and Central Asia, the Caucuses. This is a problem, but it could be the greatest opportunity.”
