Full Carbon Account for Russia

The Forestry Project (FOR) at IIASA has produced a full carbon account (FCA) for Russia for 1990, together with scenarios for 2010. Currently, there are rather big question marks regarding the existing carbon accounts for Russia, and Russia is critical to the global carbon balance due to its size. IIASA is in a position to perform solid analysis of Russia because of the databases that the Institute has built over the years. FOR based this work on a comprehensive geographic information system comprising georeferenced descriptions of the environment and land of Russia, which in turn are based on a number of thematic, digitized maps and databases. For the Russian energy sector and other industrial sectors (except the forest industry), the project used emissions estimates from the recent IIASA study "Global Energy Perspectives" (1998). The project carried out a separate substudy for the Russian forest industry sector. According to FOR's estimate, the total fluxes (including energy and industry sectors) in Russia were a net source of 527 teragrams of carbon (Tg C) in 1990. To illustrate the possible development of the carbon pools and fluxes over the next 10 years, FOR developed three different scenarios for the period 1990-2010, reflecting different assumptions regarding Russia's GDP growth. According to these scenarios, Russia will continue to be a net source of carbon to the atmosphere with 156-385 Tg C in 2010, including the emissions from energy and other industrial sectors. However, analysis of the FCA also shows considerable uncertainties involved in the carbon accounting. These uncertainties exceed the calculated changes in the full flux balance for the period 1990-2010. At present, this raises grave questions regarding the reliability of any accounting system used to measure terrestrial ecosystems for compliance with the Kyoto Protocol.