Russia’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Decline Driven by Economic Contraction

The Russian Federation has experienced several volatile periods, both domestically and on the global stage, often caused by its turbulent political climate, the impacts of war, and by larger global forces (Bradley & Eberle, 2024;Gaddy & Ickes, 2010;Sanghi et al., 2021).In this commentary, we examine three prominent moments-the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global financial crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic-and their impacts on emissions using the IPAT framework (Brizga et al., 2013) for the Russian Federation from 1990 to 2023.Population data were omitted from the analysis as they were not found to be major drivers of changes in emissions.Voskoboynikov, I. (2017).Sources of long run economic growth in Russia before and after the global financial crisis.