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Notes
1. Conclusion of Special Issue “Sustainable Development, Regional Governance, and International Organizations: Implications for Post-Communism.” I am grateful to the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University (Sweden) for supporting this research. All opinions expressed in this article and possible errors are my own sole responsibility.
2. On the rising importance of the region and of the regional dimension in environmental governance, see, for example, Ken Conca (Citation2012).
3. See, for example, The Nobel Prize (Citation2021). The award was shared with Maria Ressa: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/muratov/facts/.
4. See, for example, Harding (Citation2022) in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/21/nobel-peace-prize-auctioned-by-russian-journalist-dmitry-muratov-fetches-record-1035m and The Nobel Prize 2021. Facts.
5. Previous studies have discussed the nexus between democracy, democratization, the diffusion of climate change policies, and the advancing environmental agenda (e.g. Kneuer Citation2012; Klinke Citation2012; Hobson Citation2012).
6. Yulia Davydova, a spokesperson for the Russian branch of the environmental group Greenpeace, points out that the new law allows building highways and pipelines crossing OOPT and that these building projects will not be subject to environmental review (as they used to be before the sanctions). Dmitry Gorshkov, the head of the World Wildlife Fund, elaborates further: “After the law is implemented, it will still seriously raise the risks of a technogenic impact inside OOPTs.”
7. Greenpeace Russia campaign director Vladimir Chuprov states that oil companies could always “get away from the financial responsibilities of oil spills and the social and environmental consequences.” Shockingly, even before the environmental review was lifted as a response to sanctions, oil leaks broke global records as oil companies “operate outside of the legal framework” (cited in Kondratenko Citation2021).
8. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 (FRA 2020): https://www.fao.org/forest-resources-assessment/2020/en/#:~:text=Forests%20around%20the%20world&text=More%20than%20half%20(54%20percent,States%20of%20America%20and%20China.
9. Reuters (Citation2022) “Ukraine War: How Western Sanctions on Russia Are Hurting Science and Climate Change Research”: https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/04/11/ukraine-war-how-western-sanctions-on-russia-are-hurting-science-and-climate-change-researc.
10. Reuters (Citation2022) cites Dr Ted Schuur, the principal investigator of the Permafrost Carbon Network at Northern Arizona University: “If you cut off your view of changing permafrost in Russia, you’re really cutting off our understanding of global changes to permafrost” (italics mine). Another example is the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Germany), which stopped sponsoring scholars at the research station in Siberia studying climate change and the melting Arctic permafrost (Reuters Citation2022).
11. Adding to the contradictions and complexity, a number of high-tech international scientific projects with major Western funding were frozen, for example a scientific project of €15 million on “designing low-carbon materials and battery technologies needed in the energy transition to combat climate change” (Reuters Citation2022).