Russia must complete the inventory of its forests and other vegetation in order to determine their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide before ratifying the Paris Agreement, Special Presidential Representative for Environmental Protection, Ecology and Transport Sergei Ivanov said on Tuesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 12th March, 2019) Russia must complete the inventory of its forests and other vegetation in order to determine their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide before ratifying the Paris Agreement, Special Presidential Representative for Environmental Protection, Ecology and Transport Sergei Ivanov said on Tuesday."I think that before ratifying the Paris Agreement we have to clearly understand the absorption capacity of our forests, along with swamps, steppes and deserts they have vegetation too," the minister said at the Russian business Week.
Ivanov noted that US forests, for example, had a much greater absorption capacity than the ones in Russia because US authorities considered every plant that is more than 1 meter (3.3 feet) high to be a tree.
"Our [Federal Agency for Forestry] Rosleshoz was charged over a year ago with urgently making all necessary calculations before the ratification of the Paris Agreement. We must clearly understand what obligations we are imposing on ourselves ... That is why Rosleshoz will finish [the forest inventory soon] soon," Ivanov added.
Ivan Valentik, the Rosleshoz head, said that the inventory of forests with the help of remote-sensing satellites would be completed by 2020.
The Paris Agreement, which is aimed at curbing climate change by trying to keep the increase in global average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, was adopted in France in 2015. To this date, the document has been ratified by 185 out of 197 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In 2017, then-Russian Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Sergei Donskoy said that Moscow intended to ratify the agreement by 2020 but the final decision would be made no sooner than early 2019.
