Adapting to what? Regional climate policy in Russia

Amidst war, sanctions, and a contracting arena for international cooperation, Russia’s response to climate change is being determined by domestic politics rather than international climate diplomacy.

While mitigation has not been a significant priority in Russian policymaking, climate adaptation has risen significantly on the agenda in recent years. Despite the fact that Russia is warming 2.5 times faster than the global average, there is a lack of knowledge in international literature about how Russia approaches climate adaptation, and how this is reflected in regional policies.

This article examines how climate adaptation is defined and implemented across eight Russian regions that vary widely in geography, population size, and climatic conditions, in addition to tracing one in-depth case of a region in the Arctic: Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, a region heavily dependent on natural gas exports while also experiencing severe climate change impacts.

By analysing federal directives, regional adaptation strategies and action plans, this study shows that ‘adaptation’ in Russian regional policy is vaguely defined and frequently connected to other policy agendas. Three main findings lead to this conclusion: First, climate adaptation is rarely the primary driver in regional policies; it operates as an instrument for existing modernization. Second, adaptation and mitigation are consequently conflated at the regional level as emission-reduction tasks are inserted into adaptation plans. Third, despite national rhetoric often highlighting benefits from climate change, regional plans foreground the risks and damages from environmental change, including wildfires, permafrost thaw, and droughts, and channel the resources into issue-specific measures such as civil protection, fire prevention, permafrost monitoring and road reinforcement.

The case of Yamal-Nenets shows that climate adaptation is implemented mainly through sectoral action plans rather than the overarching adaptation strategy, embedded in infrastructure, civil protection, and resource management programmes. Many adaptation measures are framed in terms of security or economic resilience, where adaptation functions less as standalone climate initiatives and more as an umbrella under which other infrastructural, political, and economic projects are advanced.