Russia’s Amazon

The “taiga” is twice as big and just as threatened

“Lake in taiga” by peupleloup is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse

When exactly will the forest end? I had this thought 30-odd years ago while crossing the Russian taiga on the Trans-Siberian Railroad from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk. For hours and then days, the massive boreal aggregation of pines and firs, hemlocks and spruces strobed past the train’s windows — a veritable sea of green that seemed to defy all boundaries of what I imagined an intact ecosystem looked like.

I thought again of the endless-seeming taiga this month as Russia embarked on an endless-seeming war. With sanctions effectively severing the country from the Western financial system there is a real risk that it will lean even more heavily on its forests. And if this happens, Russia could quickly transform itself from a carbon sink into a planet toaster.

At more than 12 million square kilometers, The Russian taiga is nearly double the size of the Amazon.

That process is already beginning with Russian oil. Before the war, oil accounted for around half of the country’s exports to the tune of $340 billion. With 106 billion barrels still in the ground this reserve will increasingly be Russia’s most important avenue to non-ruble currency. China, the energy-thirsty giant next door, is surely…