ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Far Eastern attitudes towards climate change are explored from the mid-1990s until today. For this purpose, articles from four Far Eastern newspapers are examined. This set of sources is complemented by a number of interviews conducted in November 2017 with scientists and environmental activists in the region. Whereas the varying coverage of climate change in the press can be explained at least partly by trends of national politics, the content of the articles as well as the interviews reveal important regional particularities: the Russian Far East is already more affected by climate change than Russia at large; engagement with climate change in the region on the part of the scientific and business communities has been at times remarkably pronounced; the region’s position in the Asia-Pacific plays an important role for this engagement with and attention given to climate change; climate scepticism among regional scientists remains widespread but less pronounced than in Russia at large; and, of late, there is a renewed interest in climate change in Primorie. After all, the topic of climate change is not only of concern, but offers opportunities for science and business, and actors in the region are willing to make use of these.
