 Hello, my name is Angelina Devadova. I come from St. Petersburg, Russia, and I'm one of the Humphrey Fellows at UC Davis in 2018-2019 program. Let me tell you a few words about what Humphrey program is and why am I here? I'm here in a wonderful cohort of 12 other Humphrey Fellows from all across the globe and and we come as a team of young mid-career professionals who arrive to the United States and spend a year here learning about environmental policy, climate policy, environmental actions, attending courses at UC Davis, giving public presentations, engaging with local community, talking with students, talking with professors, and overall learning about life in California and the United States in general. The Humphrey program brings every year around 130 young mid-career professionals from all across the globe, the globe to the United States, and they're being distributed across 12 campuses. So UC Davis is one of the receiving campuses of the program. Here you can see a picture of us who just arrived to UC Davis in August last year. We're all very happy. We don't know what awaits us. And the next few months turned out to be really exciting, really interesting, and really useful. Quite a lot of the people from the program have left already, but there are a few remaining and four of the Humphrey Fellows, including myself, took part in a public event on May 5th organized by the Cool Davis Association and the main mission of the event was to speak about climate change consequences in our countries and in our regions of the world. So what kind of negative impacts of climate change are being observed? What is happening? Why is it dangerous? What is being done? Are there any kind of adaptation strategies in the countries we come from? On the other hand, we were also encouraged to speak about mitigation policies. That is what our regions of the world are doing with regard to bringing emissions down. Greenhouse gases. The Humphrey program at UC Davis is run by the Global Affairs and here you can see information about what Global Affairs at UC Davis are and what is it that they are doing. Their main mission is to encourage international cooperation of UC Davis with other academic institutions all across the world, but not only academic institutions as our program is a non-academic and a non-degree. One. Here's some more information about the Hubert-Humphrey Fellowship program and as you can see here this year marks 40th anniversary of the program. So it looks like our program and our year was indeed very special and it proved out to be like that. So climate change. Climate change in Russia. What consequences do we have? What is happening in our part of the world? That would be the topic of my talk over the next few minutes and I'm going to show you a few maps. I'm going to show you a few pictures. I'm going to show you a few graphs and I'm going to tell you a few stories about climate change and Russia. Climate change used to be a very difficult topic for Russia. I started covering climate change and I have to tell you that I'm back at home. I'm an environmental journalist and I write for Russian international media about climate change, climate policies, global climate agenda, local climate agenda, United Nations negotiations, climate negotiations in which I've been taking part over the last 10 years. So in Russia climate change have been somewhat of a complicated topic. When I started writing about it 10 years ago that topic was not considered to be a serious one. It was somewhat of a marginal topic. People would pay very little attention to and people would not consider it to be serious. So there were all these jokes about how climate change is beneficial for Russia because Russia is a northern country and because if we have warmer climate that would mean we might be able possibly to grow bananas in Taiga or we won't need our fur coats in winter when it's so cold. However, as years go by and the results of the work of people like myself and other people who are trying to promote climate agenda and bringing the latest scientific climate data to the general public in Russia so the results of our work are finally bringing fruits and we see more and more climate awareness across the country among general public, among politicians, among business people. People are interested in the topic, people are willing to learn more, people are willing to do more, people keep asking questions what is it that we can do. So this first slide which I wanted to show you demonstrates climate change in the territory of Russia, the projected climate change in the 21st century and as you can see here some parts of the country will become much warmer than they used to be. This middle part of the country, the middle of Siberia, is probably going to get very warm. In fact, a couple of years ago during the United Nations climate negotiations in November 2017 a latest World Meteorological Organization report has been presented which made an overview of the rising temperatures all across the globe and interestingly if we look up at historic perspective the highest temperature rise we observe in the world was actually found here in this part of Russia so since 1970s average mean temperatures have increased by approximately seven degrees Celsius which is absolute maximum for the world. What does it mean for Russia and only for Russia of the whole of the world the fact that temperatures are rising up here? One can argue there are very few people living in this part of Russia. Most of Russia's population is living around here or maybe down the southern border of Siberia however here you would have very little people living. We don't have that many people there however what we do have there is permafrost and the permafrost is frozen earth which sometimes melts down in summer but sometimes doesn't it depends on where you find yourself. A climate change means more larger and larger areas of permafrost melting and releasing both methane and CO2 as a result of this process which provides a positive feedback effect bringing climate change even worse and making it even more even stronger thus increasing the temperatures and as a consequence bringing even to more permafrost melting. So it's one of the very negative consequences of climate change which is taking place in Russia right now and which has very negative consequences not only for Russia but also for the whole of the world. Unfortunately that process is taking place. Scientists do not really know what we can do about it at the moment. It's one of these loop effects where one factor causes another one and then influences back the first factor which is as I said earlier and I'll repeat it now. Increasing temperatures, permafrost melting, more greenhouse gases being released into atmosphere, climate change wars and you know we're back into the circle. On this slide you also see observed increasing temperatures all across Russia over the 20th century so the last slide we saw that was about the future. Now this one was about the past and this is also about particular seasons like winter, spring, summer and autumn so what is happening in various parts of the country and here once again you see the redder it is the hotter it got but then some parts of the country also got a bit colder and I think this is also a very important argument when I always speak about global climate change is that global climate change doesn't equal global warming. In some parts of the world it will become hotter much hotter in other parts of the world it will become colder. In some parts of the world we might experience droughts and severe droughts in other parts of the world floods so it's all about disbalances it's all about climatic systems and other ecosystems of the planet coming out of what of how we know they are coming out of balance and making a complete chaos of the way we used to know them and thus making life of people and future of ecosystems very unpredictable putting a lot of risks to economic and social activities and to lives into the health of people on the planet. Another very important consequence of climate change for Russia is the increasing number of dangerous and unpredictable and meteorological or weather phenomena that can be storms very strong winds waves of cold in winter waves of heat in summer in the regions which are not used to it floods droughts as you see their number is increasing steadily increasing we have data here on this graph from 1996 however if we were to have this data from 1970 we would see that the total number of these dangerous and hazardous hydro meteorological events have increased twice since the 70s. So even such a cold country as Russia is experiencing a number of dangerous events taking place all across the country and bringing in economic damages bringing in more risks for ecosystems for people for cities for economy for environment and this is obviously very important factor something which needs to be taken care of. I've already mentioned the permafrost problem and I gave a brief explanation why is it such an important problem and why is it the melting permafrost poses a global threat and here's one more picture when we look up not at Russia at the moment but at an Arctic and we see we kind of look at the Arctic from above from the where the North Pole is so this is where we can see Canada, Greenland, Iceland, China is here, Russia is here, Sweden is here and you can also see how rapidly temperatures have been increasing in the Arctic region over the last few years and this is also what the latest scientific data tells us and also how sea ice is diminishing in the region and keeps flowing faster and faster. A few last summers we did not have much ice in the Russian Arctic in fact throughout the whole history of scientific observations the last two summers had the least ice cover in the Arctic region adjacent to Russia yeah throughout the whole history which one can argue has both positive and negative effects so the positive effect is that now that passage will be open for more in transportation and there are a few commercial ships which already went that way bringing goods from here from here to here but then on the other hand as well with thawing permafrost melting arctic melting ice in the arctic poses quite a few global threats changes global climate changes pattern of rains in many regions across the world changes pattern of winds changes patterns of cold brings it a lot of cold into North America in winter which you probably have heard of the arctic vortex and arctic vortex has been getting more and more severe over the last few years but on the other hand also changing everything we know about how atmospheric currents move how winds come how rains come so what we are to see over the next few years is a completely new picture of the rains of the winds of many other weather patterns to what we are not used to and or which we might not still know all the consequences now this is another picture which shows the the effect of the thawing permafrost and those are the craters which keep appearing all across eastern part of Russia these craters are pretty deep and they appear as a result of melting permafrost so the way it happens is that permafrost doesn't melt gradually in fact for a while an upper crust still remains while underneath it you might have large cavities appearing and after a while the upper crust tumbles down and you'll get a crater like this so this crater was found a few years ago even though it began to sink since the 60s it is located in the Yakutia region of Russia I'll just show you on the map where it is so it's around here and as I mentioned there are quite a number of these craters appearing in the eastern part of the country and this is once again a very worrisome phenomena which scientists include an international group of scientists are currently studying now if we look up at this latest IPCC report and IPCC is international panel intergovernmental panel climate change which is a group of thousands of scientists who get together and overview of the latest data on scientific research on climate change all across the globe so the latest report which was called 1.5 degrees Celsius and that is the target which we hope the world could aim for or not allowing the planet to go any hotter than the 1.5 degrees Celsius so this latest report which came out last fall had this data available and that is it shows us what happens with arctic sea ice what happens with permafrost and what happens with glaciers if global temperatures go 1.5 degrees Celsius 2 degrees Celsius and 3 degrees Celsius and here you can see the number of the percentage of arctic sea ice melting in all with three scenarios likewise the total square of permafrost melting and likewise the areas of glaciers which the world will lose if global temperatures raise up like this and go up by 1.5 203 degrees Celsius so this is the data we have now and this once again would mean a very different world a world with far less glaciers a world with far less permafrost and a world with far less arctic ice which as i pointed out earlier will have very long running systematic consequences for many other ecosystems all across the globe now another very drastic and another very serious consequence of climate change in russia and this is also something which brings us close with to california this is where i spent the last 10 months of my life those are the wildfires you don't often hear or read about wildfires in russia these days however in mostly in eastern part of the country this is where the forests are drier than the ones in the western part of the country there are quite a number of forest fires and their intensity and their total square and the areas keep increasing from year to year and this is once again another example of a very serious and complex consequence of climate change which proves to be feedback loop connection meaning the warmer it gets the drier forests become the drier they become the more vulnerable they are to parasites and various kinds of insects and diseases more wildfires to take place in these forests wildfires meaning more greenhouse gases being released into atmosphere which in turn makes climate change even worse and brings back original effect on forest fires so this is what we observe here in california this is what we also see in russia this is a picture over and a map over over real-time satellite data on the current wildfires in mid-may so 2019 and you can see where the fires are and how intensive they are and these are a few further photographs of wildfires in russia from april 2019 and may 2019 just to show you how they look quite a lot of wildfires in russia take place in their areas which are either completely unpopulated or very densely populated if they originate in an area which are far from any human settlements they're usually not being put down which also means huge amounts of co2 emissions coming into atmosphere and a lot of black carbon or soot flying all the way to arctic and causing albedo effect which means the reflective capacity of ice and snow in the arctic becomes less and once again it brings a very negative effect both in climate change making it even stronger and making it even severe however if forest fires approach any human settlements they are obviously being fought with they're being put down people are being evacuated so the situation is pretty much the same as well as it's one in california with the wildfires here this is another picture from summer 2010 that was the only time in recent history of russia when forest fires got as close as almost around moscow and that made big news including international news so moscow was in smoke for around a week and it has been estimated that the smoke has caused around 11 000 extra deaths meaning people who have been ill or elderly have died earlier because of the effects of the smoke and that smoke once again was very similar to what we experienced here in california in my own experience the campfire last november when both davis and sacramenter were covered in smoke and people were wearing masks and people were trying to work out how to live in these conditions so that was one of the few cases when moscow experienced very similar effect of climate change what was burning around moscow it was not only forest so it was not only forest fires those were also peat fires because during the lightest years of the soviet union quite a few peat lands have been dried up around moscow and they became particularly vulnerable to uh increasing droughts and to increase in heat and as the heat wave came and as the drought came quite a few peat fires appeared and peat fires are the ones which are really difficult to put down because if you're trying to put them down with water like pouring water on them from the helicopters this is the way you would do say in trying to put down a forest fire in russia in many cases water just doesn't get as deep down as to the lowest level uh of the where the fire is actually taking place the water evaporates so a whole program of rear watering peat lands around moscow and a few other central regions of russia have been launched after following these fires and so i can say ever since 2010 we didn't have such tragic and such intense forest or peat fires in central russia however as i mentioned earlier in eastern parts of russia in eastern sebiria the forest of russia the forest fires have been on the rise they increase the intensity increase the areas increase and this is once again a very worrisome factor not only for russia but for the whole of the world now to um say a few words about russia's climate policy and to uh because i spoke quite a lot about what are the effects of climate change in russia now um my next point is uh what about greenhouse gas emissions what is being done in russia what is not being done in russia and um as you can see from this graph russia's historic emissions uh they went drastically down in the 90s and 2000s following the um demise and demolition of the soviet economy and destruction of the industrial sector so in a way following the fallout of the soviet union a lot of industry has collapsed which led to a completely new structure of the economy so today's structure of russian economy is a lot about extracting industries a lot about oil and gas industries and other fossil fuels a lot about service industries a lot about construction or services or other service sectors but not so much industrial sector not so much production sector like we see in today's china or other new industrial giant countries which led to the fact that uh countries emissions went down significantly we are now around uh something around below 30 percent uh lower in our emissions of greenhouse gases in comparison to 1990 which means russia which ratified and was a party to the Kyoto protocol has over fulfilled its Kyoto protocol target and uh but it didn't do much in fact it only happened mainly because of the collapse of the economy it should be noted that that particular process didn't only take part in russia it also took part in many other countries across eastern europe uh countries whose economy changed completely following the transformation from the communist economy or the post-communist economy into the market economy so you would get the same picture in all former soviet union republics in many countries of eastern europe even in eastern germany so you'd have similar picture now what you can also see from this graph the majority of russia's emissions are coming from the energy sector meaning use and burning down of fossil fuels for production of electricity or heating if here in california conditioning is a huge issue like on a whole day like this one then back in russia heating is a very big issue and it's something for which we need a lot of energy and a lot of fossil needs to be burned down to keep the houses warm in winter when it gets very cold so right so here's another graph showing us the historic commission of russia russia still has not ratified the paris agreement it is about to do so this year hopefully russia has its target under the paris agreement which says it aims to bring its emissions down by 25 to 30 percent by 2030 with relation to 1990 which however means it will not do much in producing emissions any further downs from the current level because as we've heard the current level of russia's emissions is around minus 30 percent already so it means their emissions will either stay at this level or might even grow a bit but then russia doesn't have growing population and most of the prospects also do not predict that there will be more people living in russia in fact most u.n. scenarios predict diminishing population in russia the economic prospects are also sometimes very unclear like how the economy will behave over the next 10 or 20 years so overall current scenarios do not show very drastic growth in russia's emissions however even with that being taken into consideration russia is still fifth largest world emitter of greenhouse gases following china the u.s european union and india and it is still a very important player and and it plays a crucial role in the global climate agenda and this is why it's super important to bring pressure to international discussions and international cooperation in the area of climate change and this is what people like myself have been trying to do both raising up climate awareness through the articles which i write for russian international media but also trying to facilitate and make come-to-life various international cooperation projects between russia and other countries or regions of the world in the area of climate cooperation so thank you for your attention i hope this presentation was useful and interesting for you and i'm open to any questions which are out there in the audience thank you thanks anjelina what a lot of information thank you that was very helpful um so obviously you are really well informed and probably you're not the typical russian resident so how how informed are most people in russia about climate change um thank you for a question um most of russians are aware of climate change and according to latest polls which have been carried out across all of the countries um quite a lot of people in russia are aware of this problem some of them also believe it is a serious threat to russia and the number of these people continue to rise however a very tiny proportion of people is worried with climate change to the extent that they're really willing to take any serious changes in their life and their lifestyles and actually do something um it should be noted that environmental awareness has been really on the rise in russia over the few last years and this is something which i've been observing in my work and in my activity and while talking to people while seeing what happens all across the country uh however most environmental problems which people are worried about are very local on hyperlocal environmental problems those would be waste management issues of recycling air pollution information about air quality information about water quality anything to do with green areas in cities urban development sustainable urban development more and more people in russia are moving from rural areas to urban areas so cities are growing there's a lot of construction taking place so any questions relating to trees to green zones to parks all these are very burning issues and people easily get organized in movements to support these issues to fight for these issues there are a lot of grassroots environmental movements however most of them are fighting and for very local or hyperlocal causes and don't deal that much with climate change agenda as i've seen as the regions of the world however as i mentioned the situation is changing the awareness is very slowly but it's growing so let's see what happens over the next few years i was really interested that your presentation pointed out so clearly in a geographically varied region like russia that while climate change has undone undeniable negative effects there are also what could be perceived as positive outcomes and is this a complicating factor in making policy decisions has it come into play and in coming up with a climate policy for the country yes thank you for a question it is indeed so it is indeed a complicating factor because whenever there are analysis or climate reports coming out in russia like climate change assessment reports which regularly appear in russia they obviously bring in and they obviously state all these negative effects of climate change which i mentioned in my presentation but they also do bring up some positive effects including warmer climate which means we will need less money and less energy for heating more chances for marine transportation across the northern border of russia in the arctic ocean and possibly better conditions for agriculture in the south of russia so yeah there are both positive and negative effects but then as russian scientists often say positive effects come easy and we don't need to do anything for them however negative effects often come unexpected and we should be prepared and we should really think about adaptation and we should really thinking about diminishing climate risks but yes you're right it's after all it's both positive and negative effects of climate change that we're speaking about another very complicated factor in russia which also makes it not very easy to push climate agenda forward is the fact that russia's economy is deeply connected with oil and gas sector and fossil fuel sector meaning extraction of oil gas and coal and selling it to other countries and indeed with these sectors being seen as the basis for russia's economy bringing in low carbon agenda or decarbonization agenda is once again is not a very easy task however there's a group of ambitious climate activists which you find in many regions across russia and many organizations across russia which are trying to bring this issue forward which is trying to say look it's not only about us it's also about what the whole world is doing where the world is going to if there will be less demand for fossil fuel in future what are we going to do so there are also all this talks about how global decarbonization influences russia's economy and prospects of russia's economy and how we should possibly restructure russia's economy instead developing other sectors and not on the fossil fuel sector does the government have programs trying to encourage people to use less fossil fuels at all are there such programs or um well there is a a number of laws like legislation or energy efficiency which encourages people and organizations and institutions to become more energy efficient and to save energy then there's another law and a set of regulation which encourages the development of renewable energy including solar and wind that development has been very modest the so-called new renewable energy meaning solar and wind still plays a very minor role in russian energy balance something around one percent of the total energy balance however what we've seen over the last few years is some modest development so the raw solar parks appear in russia there are wind parks appear in russia a number of large international players including fortum or nl so like large energy companies have investment invested in russian energy renewable energy sector so we see this appearing but it mostly appears not in terms of like people's private houses or communities but mostly in terms of larger solar parks or wind parks this also has been a new legislation coming into power which allows people to have solar panels or a wind mill in the private house so it and then use need metering to calculate how much energy you produce and give into the grid and then how much energy you get back into the grid from the grid however that sector has been developing really slow because there are not that many financial incentives for people to use it because traditional energy fossil fuel energy is still very cheap in russia and so we see very modest development of this but then this can once again change a great sector for development of renewables in russia this is what many experts are saying is that large territories large areas of russia which are located mostly around i'll just show you on the map which are mostly located around this area the area of the so-called decentralized energy supplies that means since the population density is so low you would probably have like a city here and a city here and they would not be connected to the grid like to the overall grid of any you know regional grid in russia up until recently they would have diesel brought to these settlements by helicopters because there are no roads to get there and well using diesel and burning diesel is environmentally unsustainable it costs a lot and there have been a number of projects coming into life was trying to replace this diesel by hybrid solar diesel stations or wind diesel stations or wind and solar and diesel stations meaning if there is sun then there is solar energy coming if there's wind and there's wind energy coming and if there is none of that then we'll probably use diesel and we've seen some of these projects once again appearing in the republic of iakutia which is one of the most the coldest regions of the world but it's also one of the saddest regions of the world and there have been a few experiments with constructing solar parks in a very cold climate in this area of russia so this is possibly the most promising sector for development of renewable energy including solar and wind for the next few years wow passive solar would work well too there like my house they wouldn't even have to have solar panels just constructing the buildings such that they capture the heat from the sunlight coming into the house would and and some kind of storage for it like the tubes of water that i have yeah would work there yeah um which would be a very inexpensive way to capture that that that potential wow um so yeah this is so interesting to hear this um what about activism you've been here long enough to realize we're beginning to have a bit of a perhaps we can call the groundswell of activism in our country where we have um different groups who are starting to show up in the street saying we must have changed now um and um we have a climate student climate strike group and of course grata tunberg from sweden is leading it but we're picking up our own leaders here in the us and we have the sunrise group who are youth millennium students graduates leading that and and other groups that are getting very active do you have a a a growing group of activists who are saying we can't ignore this um well there is a group of activists who are also worried about climate change and following grata's case we had a number of young people also in russia coming out and showing their commitment to the global climate fight however as i mentioned earlier most of campaigns most of environmental campaigns in russia are still concentrated around local environmental topics and that would be waste air quality trees issues other green issues so climate activism is not widely rooted is not as widespread even if this is here but i think we might see more of that coming in the future sort of in a similar but a little more negative vein and here we have a block of people some with great power that are essentially climate deniers so so calm and that refuse to acknowledge the the importance of the scientific data and and the outcomes that are being predicted and is that also a problem in russia or are people in general and receptive to the science and are are just beginning to be aware of the implications well i think it's a problem everywhere in the world so also in russia we do have climate denialists also among some of the scientists also among representatives of some of the companies which are also willing to pay for the research and are interested in research which brings them particular results with you know support climate denialism overall i would say in general population climate denialism is not that present but within professional community you sometimes have people you have politicians you have scientists coming up and saying that the whole climate change that's that's a scam or that's a global conspiracy or you know something like that so you have them but i would say you probably have them almost all around the world but in my opinion like the overall general trend is that there is less climate denialism now than it used to be and overall the topic now is being taken more seriously than it used to be before on various levels thank you thank you so much how interesting this has been and i hope we can keep in touch and um see see how it progresses and thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to speak and to share my knowledge and um i very much hope to coming back and to develop further cooperation with serial davis