Environmental Security Policies of the Russian Federation

Abstract

Since the earliest times of history, humanity has been known to be fighting an existential war against nature. Although man’s struggle against his natural environment has not caused severe damage to nature for centuries, human-induced natural environmental degradation has begun to be seen with modernization, the effect of which was experienced to a great extent in the 20th century. With both population growth and technological developments, humanity has achieved significant gains in its struggle for survival against nature, but these gains have turned against humanity itself with the irreversible deterioration of nature. This degradation, which started with environmental pollution in the past and resulted in climate changes today, has been taken care of by modern states, which have significant power in the governance of people. These modern states, which previously had a security perspective through their relations, have started to take steps as environmental problems harm their legitimacy and citizens. States had to come together to solve this common problem no matter how different they were in government type and ideology. Since the day it left the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has not refrained from taking national steps toward the global environmental security regime. Although like many states, the fight against environmental problems has made mistakes and shortcomings, it has cooperated internationally for various reasons. The most important reason is that the Russian Federation is at the top of the list of states polluting nature. But apart from this, environmental security has been the area of interest of the Kremlin administration due to its geopolitical and geostrategic interests in the international system. Therefore, it has set targets on environmental security in documents such as foreign policy and security concepts adopted since the early 1990s. This study aims to examine the national and international environmental policies of the Russian Federation on global climate change. For this reason, firstly, a brief introduction to the subject of environmental security will be made, and the documents containing the political and security perspective of the Russian Federation will be discussed in the next section. In the last part, it will try to summarize what kind of international contribution and cooperation the Russian Federation has made in solving environmental problems.