Trends

Russia’s Northern cities are becoming nature positive

We cannot bring the city closer to the wilderness. But we can make changes to reduce the environmental impact and improve quality of life. For this purpose, megacities are shifting their development strategies from environmental friendliness to nature positive models.

Many industrial cities in the North have the same goals: their people must be able to breathe clean air and drink pure water, enjoy comfortable and attractive recreation facilities, use environmentally friendly urban transport, and have access to high-quality health care and education.

When combined, these conditions help stop population outflows. In addition to wages, industry offers benefits that attract young talent from other regions. For example, being nature positive helps address staffing shortages.

Environmental ratings of cities

How can we understand whether a city is nature positive, to channel investment into problem areas? No methodology is approved today at federal level, so we have to turn to rankings and bio indicators assessed by businesses.

Rankings. The main ones for Russia include the National Environmental Rating, ranking of cities with most polluted air by INFRAGRIN, data from Strelka Consulting Bureau and the list of cities from the Ministry of Natural Resources.

The trouble is that the same city can top both positive and negative rankings. For example, Ufa is in the top three by share of greenery in total land area but it is also number one in air pollution. However, there are general patterns.

NATALYA KOLDOBSKAYA,
PhD in Geography, Associate Professor for Geography Faculty at the Moscow State University, Russian Economic and Social Geography Department, explains that

“… according to environmental ratings, industry is the main source of air pollution in 60% of the cases. Transport accounts for the other 40%. Moreover, rankings often include cities that do not have centralized heating”.

Coal and wood-fired heating in the private housing sector can produce the same amount of harmful emissions as heavy car traffic.

Since 2018, when the environmental protection law was amended, Russian industry majors have set up monitoring over, and reduced emissions of, air pollutants. Industrial wastewater treatment facilities have also been upgraded.

Natalya Koldobskaya notes that in 2024, environmental focus shifted from million-plus cities to cities with population from 100 thousand to half a million people. Small factories in these cities around industrial areas and large plants impact the environment greatly, said Aleksey Knizhnikov, expert at the Nature and People Foundation. Today, medium enterprises are starting to control their emissions, and emissions from small enterprises are not subject to any supervision.

Bio indicators. Another global trend to help develop an assessment framework for nature positive criteria is the emergence of the bio indicators system. Large businesses that publish ESG reports have been showing their pollutant emissions for many years.

In recent years, they have added the bio indicators to their disclosures. These indicators demonstrate environmental changes that reveal the extent of industrial impact. For example, Nornickel, SIBUR, Moscow Oil Refinery, and Severstal have approached the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) to design methodologies for calculating bio indicators.

The next anticipated step is for the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources, together with the scientific community, to develop a federal system and methodology for calculating bio indicators, set to become a standard regulation for industrial and population centers.

ALEKSEY KNIZHNIKOV:

“It is essential to get a unified system of bio indicators from the Ministry of Natural Resources. Similar efforts are underway around the world, but no one has showcased a calculation system for their country yet. Russian scientists have already done massive amounts of work, and we are expecting this methodology to be produced”.

Drivers behind relocation decisions, and the role of environment in them

Environmental sustainability is not a decisive factor when a young professional agrees to move to a new place of work. People put housing, education, and income first.

‘Green’ performance account for up to 20% in the overall quality of life assessment for a particular city, according to Ilya Spivak, government and social initiatives expert at Exos Consulting, manager of the Quality of Life Indices in ESG Alliance Host Regions project.

Role of environmental aspects in calculating the quality of life indices, examples

Components commonly used in disclosures of ‘green’ aspects of the quality of life indices	Explanation
Public spaces, 5.3%*	Green spaces within the city boundaries, % Average area of city parks / outdoor public spaces per resident, square meters
Natural and environmental conditions, 5.2%*	Average annual concentration of suspended solids, µg/m3 Contaminated and poorly treated wastewater in total wastewater discharged into surface water bodies, %
Climate, 4.5%*	Days in a year when the weather differs from perfectly comfortable, % Average sunny hours per year, hours per year
Cleanliness and hygiene, 2.6%*	Population provided with high quality potable water from a centralized water supply system, % Solid municipal waste fed to treatment in total solid waste, %
‘Green’ aspects in other quality of life components	Premises equipped with individual metering devices, % Transportation by municipal e-transport, %

*Weight of components calculated for ВCG’s Cities of Choice ranking based on the survey that included 52,000 respondents.

The Russian Public Opinion Research Center has estimated that the residents’ environmental satisfaction index is 53 points for Russia in general and 30 for Siberia.

NIKOLAY DORONIN,
First Deputy Chairman of the Environment and Sustainable Development Commission with the Russian Civic Chamber:

“10% of young population in Siberia believe that the situation in their place of residence is very bad. This is 2-3 times more than the share of unsatisfied responses among other age groups. This means that younger people that we count on have greater environmental expectations”.

Overall, 25% of the population named poor drinking water quality as their main concern. 20% are concerned about garbage. Gas contamination ranked third.

Unified quality of life assessment

Anastasia Savelyeva, manager of the Quality of Life Indices within the Remit of the ESG Alliance Social Responsibility Committee project and Head of Sustainable Development at Metalloinvest, spoke about the quality of life index for Russian cities.

This assessment will reduce subjectivity and help obtain comparable data for industrial agglomerations. The index is designed for population centers with 100 thousand people or more.

The task is to cover all aspects of urban life, including environmental ones. However, most governmental administrations today only report on two environmental indicators:

amount of municipal waste, and
amount of environmental investment.

The absence of a unified approach to seeing the big picture of the environmental impact that cities and individual facilities produce is a major problem, says Aleksey Firsov, head of Platforma Center for Social Design research and consulting company.

Industrial policy departments, environmental agencies, urban development services and other organizations – all stick to their own plans, and their assessments are not comparable. Municipal authorities of many cities are unable to provide even such simple data as total park land area. So, when calculating indices, you have to rely on community surveys.

10-year master plans where nature positivity is not measured

The development of the Arctic regions is a priority for Russian economic policy, and this is heavily influenced by the availability, and retention, of a qualified workforce. To attract, and retain, people, we need to improve the quality of life now. There is no time to sit around and wait for the assessment system to evolve.

What range of services do cities need? What living conditions need to be created? What infrastructure is required? The answers to these questions are contained in the master plans for 16 key population centers in the Arctic. These are the fundamental documents for strategic management, explains Anton Narchuganov, head of the Agency for Northern Development and Support of Indigenous Peoples of the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

Development of strategically important cities in the Arctic zone, Norilsk-Dudinka agglomeration

Modernize the scientific and educational sphere
Renovate the housing stock and improve territories
Renew the utilities infrastructure
Develop the transport infrastructure
Develop the social infrastructure
Develop digital services and support business initiatives
Preserve traditional knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples

Planned indicators	Current indicators
GMP up by 44% to RUB 1.4 tn Population up by 6.5% to 208.8 thous. people Investment: RUB 1.34 tn Southern cluster – RUB 91 bn, 233 jobs Platinoid deposits – RUB 521 bn, 6,000 jobs	198 thous. people – population (177.4 thous. people in Norilsk, 20.3 thous. people in Dudinka) RUB 150k – average salary RUB 900 bn – GMP 2 million tons – cargo turnover

The master plan for each territory provides for several action areas to improve urban environments:

introduce technology and build waste processing facilities, and at the same time adopt waste sorting behavior among people,
reclaim territories,
develop environmental frameworks and unlock nature’s potential,
reduce anthropogenic footprint on air, water and soil,

Urban heat islands. Governed by international experience, megacities struggle to mitigate heat island impacts. Urban heat islands are areas 10-15℃ warmer than average which has a negative impact on the environment, says Olga Gai, project manager at the Moscow Urban Forum. Corporations pioneer the fight against heat islands.

Action area: waste recycling

The problem of responsible consumption cannot be addressed without systemic measures. It requires new technology-intensive facilities to sort and process various types of waste.

For example, there is a plan to build a Norilsk Eco-Technology Cluster for processing, recycling, neutralization, and disposal of municipal solid waste. The cluster will satisfy the requirements of the city and surrounding population centers.

Types of processing operations to be established in the cluster:

sorting
physical and chemical treatment and disposal,
high-temperature neutralization,
construction waste recycling,
pyrolysis and crushing of tires and rubber products.

YULIA GRIBANOVA,
Deputy Director at Norilsk Development Agency:

“A land plot has already been allocated and transferred to regional ownership. We are attracting small businesses to take up processing of various types of waste. Many are ready to cooperate and expect processing quantity numbers from us to plan their work. Now we are working on arranging waste removal, which is a major problem”.

Action area: urban spaces and landscaping

Parks and recreation areas. Urban land reclamation is gaining momentum. Even small towns with up to 100 thousand people initiate environmental projects, receive government grants for them and begin consistent reclamation and improvement of industrial areas and unoccupied land plots.

For example, Ust-Labinsk with under 40 thousand people participated in the Best Municipal Practice all-Russian competition with the City Garden project and got RUB 36 mln for second place in the improvement category.

When improving urban territories with complex climates, primarily in the North, it is very hard to supply projects with endemic plants. Tree farms are scarce, and the range of available plants is very limited.

Low municipal standards for the use of green spaces make the job even harder. Plantings are not taken care of, as no such expenses are planned in the budget, says Anna Ishchenko, CEO of the Wowhouse architectural bureau. But the ice is breaking.

Industrial areas. Over the past 7 years, businesses with large scale production operations have become the main initiators of urban territory improvement projects. To compare: 15 years ago, our bureau worked on urban spaces in Moscow and other cities with a population of over one million.

ANNA ISHCHENKO:

“Enterprises that are not part of big holdings began to approach us. For example, we got an order from the director of a plant that makes custom equipment. There are only 20 such plants in the world, they know each other well and exchange experience. However, driving up to the plant, visitors from peer companies see this ugly, abandoned territory. There is no way that a facility like this can appear to be an attractive partner or employer”.

In between a park and industrial area. Improved recreation areas and factory sites could be linked by business districts that provide accessible space for comfortable communication.

Action area: development of ecotourism

Ecotourism development entails environmental improvements, and the environmental agenda means a lot for young people. So, if the regional government and industry want to compete for human resources, they need to ensure that young professionals are comfortable where they live, believes Yulia Filatova, Deputy Head of the Administrative Office of the Krasnoyarsk Territory Governor.

Three pillars for mass ecotourism development:-

reduce anthropogenic load,
shape the ecotourism culture and promote respect for the natural environment. Any culture should be taught from a very early age, so school students in the Krasnoyarsk Territory are awarded certificates to travel around the region. Nornickel provides transportation to the journey starting point;
create infrastructure for ecotourism.

Infrastructure addresses three goals at a time. First, it attracts new visitors. In 2018, 150 thousand people visited the Krasnoyarsk Pillars (also known as Stolby) national park, then in 2023, this number rose to 250-300 thousand. Over these years, the park got new eco trails, breakout areas, a visitor center, a café, and a parking lot.

Secondly, stage-by-stage development with new eco trails and infrastructure helps to evenly distribute the anthropogenic load across the natural landscape, explains Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, director of the Krasnoyarsk Stolby Nature Reserve. Nature has time to recover.

Thirdly, infrastructure facilities make it comfortable, safe and easy to access the memorable sites. And people begin to perceive themselves as part of a beautiful city. Self-determination and pride for one’s place of work and living create powerful incentives to move.

Focus on small businesses and private sector

Industrial enterprises now realize the importance of the environmental agenda and are upgrading their operations. Industry-intensive cities have come to grips with the problem that pollutants mainly originate from urban infrastructure, small and medium enterprises, and the private sector.

For example, in Krasnoyarsk one car alone emits 250 kg of air pollutants warming up during winter. This number was calculated by scientists during an experiment in 2018. According to Rosstat, in 2024 there are ca. 368,000 personal cars in Krasnoyarsk, which all together emit more than 90 thousand tons of pollutants.

Vladimir Chasovitin, Krasnoyarsk Territory Minister of Environment, believes that small businesses and people need to rethink their contribution to environmental welfare. “Times have changed, and now everyone should ask themselves what they have done to improve the environmental situation. This applies to both local residents and businesses”.

October, 2024

2024-11-05 16:02 Social Russia Trends