RUSAL is focused on the Company's climate strategy especially the reduction of greenhouse gasses. The key environmental goal of RUSAL is to achieve carbon neutrality, when the volume of greenhouse gases generated is not only reduced, but also fully compensated. One of the solutions to this problem is to increase the absorption capacity of the forest fund in the regions where the Company operates.
In March 2019, RUSAL announced the launch of its global environmental programme to plant 1 mln trees, as well as to perform a number of other reforestation activities. The project became the first large-scale voluntary initiative in Russia aimed at absorbing greenhouse gases and combating climate change and saw RUSAL join the UN programme to restore 350 mln hectares of forest worldwide by 2030.
The Green million project is implemented in two regions where the Company has operations – the Irkutsk region and the Krasnoyarsk territory, where the Company planted 500 thousand trees in each. In particular, the Bokhansky district, where the forest was most severely affected by a fire in 2016, the town of Shelekhov, where the Irkutsk Aluminium Smelter is located, and a number of other areas were chosen in the Irkutsk region as the main locations for reforestation. The total tree planting area exceeds 125 hectares.
In the Krasnoyarsk territory, the project began with the planting of 500 thousand pine seedlings on an area of 120 hectares in the Dzerzhinsky district, which was affected by a large-scale fire in 2017. The plan is to increase the reforestation area to 190 hectares. According to the agreement between the government of the Krasnoyarsk territory and RUSAL, the Company will finance agrotechnical tending of the planted trees for five years, as well as forest protection works in the Lower Yenisei Forestry on an area of about 500 thousand hectares.