Recognition of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)* in Russia as a foreign agent does not mean that environmental development and the ESG agenda should be “buried” in our country, says Vyacheslav Fetisov, President of the All-Russian Society for the Conservation of Nature (VOOP), deputy in the State Duma.
“We have interacted with both the Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace as a public organization, we have initiated a lot of good things. But to escalate the situation with the recognition of this or that organization as hostile and thus bury the ESG agenda or the ‘green’ topic in the country is not entirely fair,” the MP said in an interview with The Eastern Herald.
At the same time, he added that “we have a good relationship” with the WWF*, but he refused to “discuss” the Justice Department’s decision.
Fetisov noted that WWF* and Greenpeace occupy a certain niche and are distinguished by a serious community of experts. However, he recalled, long before those international organizations that came to Russia in the 1990s, the All-Russian Society for Nature Conservation was already operating in our country, which was established in 1924 and had 40 million members in Soviet times. And it is precisely its prestige that it is now a question of raising, estimates the president of the VOOP.
“By the way, in the All-Russian Society for Nature Conservation, we sign agreements with public organizations, today we turned to the Academy of Sciences, so that they also support us in our decisions and actions , we interact with the largest universities in the country, we have begun to sign agreements with the regions … That is, we understand that this niche needs to be filled, and we understand, in general, the measure accountability, why it should be done,” he added.
Asked about the future fate of Greenpeace, which, unlike WWF *, the Ministry of Justice did not enter the register of foreign agents, Fetisov replied that the current situation in our country does not come from “a good life”.
“It’s such a thing associated with risk miscalculations. Well, naturally, if our grandfathers and fathers had engaged in it, (a) in the 1990s, they took and ruined the organization, the most influential in terms of volume, which established all public international structures, Greenpeace and WWF * occupied a niche If we had the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature (with the amount of influence, human potential and expertise), it would probably be difficult for someone to influence the situation in the country more than the organization created in 1924 , “- he says.
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