Medvedev toughens up Russia's 2020 emissions target

The chances of next month's Copenhagen summit ending in a meaningful international deal on climate change received a significant boost yesterday when Russia signalled it would increase its emission target for 2020.

Officials confirmed that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told an EU-Russian summit yesterday that the country would increase its emission reduction target for 2020 from a 10-to-15 per cent cut on 1990 levels to a 22-to-25 per cent cut.

"With the Copenhagen conference starting in just over two weeks, I very much welcome the signal from President Medvedev today of their proposed emissions reduction target of 25 per cent," said European Commission president José Manuel Barroso. "This is indeed very encouraging."

The revised target is significant, as Russia has been widely regarded as dark horse at the Copenhagen negotiations, with some observers speculating that the country could scupper a deal.

Its initial target of cutting emissions 10 to 15 per cent by 2020 was also widely criticised by green groups who argued that the collapse of the Russian economy in the early 90s meant that the target would allow the country to increase emissions by up to 30 per cent from current levels.

The new target will probably still allow for some increase in emissions over the next decade, but any rise will be far more modest than initially expected and is likely to be accompanied by a fall in carbon intensity.

Russia becomes the latest in a series of countries to announce more ambitious emission targets in recent weeks, and with China and the US confirming this week that they will announce medium-term targets at the Copenhagen Summit, optimism is again mounting that some sort of political deal can be reached that will enable a legally binding treaty to be signed next year.

Yesterday's summit also saw a deal reached on energy security, with the EU and Russia signing a memorandum requiring them to inform each other of any likely disruption to energy supplies. They also pledged to work together to resolve any future problems, following the suspension of Russian gas supplies to Europe earlier this year over a row between Russia and the Ukraine.

However, there was no breakthrough reported on the issue of Assigned Amount Units (AAUs), the carbon allowances that countries hold under the Kyoto Agreement and are allowed to sell to nations that exceed their emission caps.

As a result of the Post-Soviet break-up drop in carbon emissions, Russia is holding AAUs worth billions of dollars, and it remains unclear whether it will respond to calls from other countries to retire them as part of an attempt to ensure any Post-Kyoto deal delivers real reductions in emissions, or flood the market with AAUs, allowing countries that fail to cut emissions to simply buy cheap credits.