Protests at COP29 over Russia's Ukraine emissions claim

Russia has included the territories it occupies in Ukraine in its recent greenhouse gas inventory report to the United Nations, drawing protests from Ukrainian officials and activists at the COP29 climate summit. The move by Moscow comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin eyes potential peace deal negotiations with incoming US President Donald Trump that could decide the fate of vast swathes of territory. "We see that Russia is using international platforms to legalise their actions, to legalise their occupation of our territory," Ukraine's Deputy Environment Minister Olga Yukhymchuk told Reuters. She said Ukraine was in touch with officials from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN's main climate body, to ask it to resolve the dispute. Officials representing the Russian foreign ministry and the framework convention did not respond to requests for comment sent on Thursday. At issue is Russia's National Inventory Report of greenhouse gas emissions for 2022, which Moscow submitted to the framework convention on November 8. In the submission, reviewed by Reuters, Russia said it could only provide data for 85 out of 89 of its territories "due to the absence of baseline data on land use for the territories of the Donetsk People's Republic, Luhansk People's Republic, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, annexed in September 2022". Russia had already included emissions from Ukraine's Crimea region, annexed in 2014, in its previous few reporting submissions to the framework convention. It also included Crimea's land development plans in a report to the UN Global Biodiverity Framework in 2020. Ukrainian Environment Minister Svitlana Grynchuk raised the issue in a speech to delegates at the COP29 summit during the week, saying Russia's reporting on Ukraine's territories undermined the integrity of global climate efforts. "It will bring us to a point that we do not achieve any of our goals if we don't have proper reporting under the Paris Agreement," she said. Christina Voigt, a law professor at the University of Oslo, said Russia's reporting on Ukraine's emissions violated Ukraine's sovereignty and could be illegal. "Claiming emissions as if they were from their own territory, while they are in fact generated on another country's territory, is a unilateral declaration in violation of the international legal status of that territory," Voigt said. She said Russia's claim of the annexed lands' emissions could become even more problematic if Moscow claimed emissions reductions on these lands and offered them as offset credits to carbon markets. "This would indeed be an illegal appropriation of a good belonging to the other state," she said.