Greenhouse gas emission scenarios for Russia and rest of the world

The paper explores the reasons behind the evolution of judgments of the energy sector development and the resulting expansion of the variety of projection-based scenarios both for Russia and globally. It shows that there are two types of scenarios depending on the degree of climatic risks accounting: zero and imperative, the latter requiring an abrupt reduction of emissions. The difference is resolved by developing scenarios that optimize overall costs of emission reduction and adaptation to the negative effects. Development of such scenarios involves substantial difficulties, so it is unlikely that Russia’s and other countries’ targets analyzedin the paper will be significantly changed before 2020. Calculations on the TIMES international model used in Russia for the first time showed that economically optimal development of the country’s energy sector leads to the stabilization of CO2 emission at 75% of the 1990 level, and to further reduction to 70% by 2030. Reduction beyond these values requires additional costs, for example, emission charges. However, in Russia there isevidence of non-optimal development in the recent years, leading to the emission growth.