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Soviet Collective Farmland Falling Into Disuse Is Accidentally Locking Up Tons of Carbon

The fallow land has been locking away the equivalent of 10 percent of Russia's CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
"Howling against the kulaks, the unanimous, collective voice on crop!" via

In the category of silver-linings-to-dark-clouds, the economic turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union had an environmental upside. Farmland in Russia that had been cultivated by collective farming has fallen into disuse on a massive scale, and has consequently become the largest man-made carbon sink ever.

As the Soviet Union dissolved in the early 1990s, collective farms lost state-guaranteed marketing and distribution. The tumultuous transitional years saw the abandonment of almost a quarter of Russia’s arable land. More than 173,746 square miles of farmland was left to fallow as the share of agriculture in total GDP in Russia decreases from 14.3 percent in 1991 to 4 percent in 2011. It was the biggest land use change of the 20th century in the northern hemisphere.

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And nature, doing as it does, retook the land. Just as the area around Chernobyl became a verdant wildlife sanctuary because it’s too radioactive for human inhabitants, economic devastation opened the door for wild plants to begin growing over farmland—and locking up carbon as they grew. Literally tons of it.

Abandoned former collective farm in Estonia via Juri/Flicker

Researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Pushchino published a study in the journal Global Change Biography that compared Russia’s soil types with where land use had changed in order to estimate how much carbon was being sequestered. According to the New Scientist:

The 455,000 square kilometres of land abandoned in the part of the USSR that is now Russia has locked away an average of 42.6 million tonnes of carbon every year since 1990. This means that each year, the land has been locking away the equivalent of 10 percent of Russia's carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, the researchers calculate.

Modelling the effect into the future, Kurganova estimates that, since the land has remained uncultivated, another 261 million tonnes will be sequestered over the next 30 years. At this point, the landscape will reach equilibrium, with the same amount of carbon escaping into the atmosphere as is being taken up.

As the blog Take Part points out, letting a quarter of your farmland go fallow isn’t an advisable strategy to combat climate change, as there are hungry people out there. But even Cold War-winning America has seen some farmland return to nature in its past.

Harvard researchers estimate that New England was down to 30-40 percent forests in the mid-19th century, but as farmers went west, the forests returned. Today New England is the most heavily forested area of the country, at 80 percent. Researchers at Tufts University are trying to quantify how much carbon can be sequestered by converting more open land in Maine and Massachusetts to trees, and also how many forests are at high-risk of being chopped down again.

Research that quantifies carbon sequestration in undeveloped and uncultivated land has the potential to change how land is developed in the future. It allows for more realistic assements of the emissions that come from deforestation. It also points toward methods like "no-till" farming, which, if practiced across all of America's farmland, would create a 300-million-metric-ton carbon sink, as noted by Take Part.  One hopes that it will take less than a wide-scale societal collapse for us to pay attention.