Future climate polygon

Russia is actively developing a network of carbon sinks that encompass the full diversity of the country’s unique ecosystems, from flat steppes and Black Sea algae fields to the Arctic tundra. The establishment of these landfills will build competence in carbon management, ecosystem restoration and natural resource management. Thanks to the technologies tested at these sites, the country will be able to offset not only its own greenhouse gas emissions but also foreign emissions — and earn profits from them.

What are carbon landfills and why are they needed

In recent years, greenhouse gas emissions have been breaking new records. In 2020, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 413.2 ppm (parts per million) — 149% higher than pre-industrial levels. The methane content has increased by 262% and ozone oxide by 123%.

At the moment, about half of the anthropogenic emissions that contribute to the greenhouse effect and accelerate global warming are accumulated in the atmosphere. The rest of the greenhouse emissions are absorbed by terrestrial and marine ecosystems. And if humanity learns to manage their capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, it will be a key tool in achieving a zero-carbon balance.

Russia intends to reach carbon zero by 2060. To provide the country with an effective means of achieving this goal, in February 2021, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation launched a pilot project to create carbon test sites in Russian regions. This project is expected to become a key element of the national system for monitoring greenhouse gas flows in Russian ecosystems and controlling the country’s carbon balance.

Carbon sequestration sites are test sites where natural greenhouse gas emissions from ecosystems are measured and the extent to which those same ecosystems are able to absorb emissions from the atmosphere is measured. It is also where all kinds of sustainable management approaches and technologies are developed and tested to improve the ability of natural areas to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

 

First Rosyanka marine carbon test site opened in Kaliningrad region
Cover photo: Press Service of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science

The role of terrestrial and marine ecosystems in tackling global warming

Covering 31% of the Earth’s land mass (almost 4 billion hectares), all forests on the planet absorb 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year — around 7% of global emissions (38 billion tonnes in 2020) and around a third of emissions from burning fossil fuels. This is ensured by the fact that plants feed on carbon dioxide as they grow.

However, much larger natural carbon stores are peatlands, wetlands that are based on peat deposits. This is a rock that is formed in wetlands from plants that have not fully decomposed: all the carbon they have stored is not released into the environment, but remains tied up in the peat. Peatlands cover less than 3% of the world’s land area (400 million hectares), but absorb 600 billion tonnes of CO2 — almost half the carbon stored in soils. Every year, they absorb 370 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Remarkably, almost all the carbon on the planet (83%) flows through the world’s oceans in one way or another. And up to half of this is stored in coastal ecosystems: mangroves, tidal marshes (aka salt marshes) and seagrass meadows (grasses lining the seabed in shallow water) — all of which store many times more carbon per unit volume than terrestrial forests.

Finally, 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon are trapped in the top metres of the world’s soils. This is almost twice as much as in the entire atmosphere and tens of times the annual emissions of humankind.

It is important to understand that when these ecosystems are destroyed, all these ecosystems return the absorbed carbon to the atmosphere: deforested or burned forests, drained swamps, irrationally cultivated soils turn from absorbers of greenhouse gases to emitters of them. Thus, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, in the entire history of mankind, unsustainable agriculture has degraded about one third of the world’s soils, leading to the emission of 78 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Yet humankind, right now, has enormous potential to remove greenhouse gases from the air through restoration and sustainable management of ecosystems. Widespread adoption of currently available conservation farming practices, for example, would remove up to 51 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere, an order of magnitude more than is currently in the atmosphere. In addition, yields would increase significantly — for example, by 17.6 million tonnes of soybeans, maize, and wheat per year.

The Russian carbon reservoirs should be used as sites for the development and testing of such approaches and technologies — before they are subsequently implemented at the level of the national economy.

Map of the location of carbon test sites in Russia
Image: Ministry of Education and Science of Russia

Carbon farming

Today, there are 15 carbon landfills covering a total area of about 40,000 hectares across the country. By 2030, the number of such sites is set to increase to 80. Each site is created in partnership with scientific organisations, big business and universities. They serve as training grounds for highly qualified personnel in the latest environmental control methods, promising technologies for low-carbon industry, agriculture and municipal economy.

The first project of the Ministry of Education and Science was the Tyumen carbon polygon in August 2021. It was created on the basis of the biostation “Lake Kuchak” of Tyumen State University. The project involves the A. N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Tyumen Scientific Centre of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The industrial partner is SIBUR, the technological partner is Geoscan Group.

The 10,700-hectare polygon covers different types of forest, lakes, marshes and agricultural areas. It analyses the area to calculate biological mass, plant species composition and soil conditions, and the information is collected using both ground-based equipment and unmanned systems.

A key task for the researchers is to analyse each ecosystem’s potential to sequester (absorb) greenhouse gases. The most effective combinations of plant species and varieties will serve as a platform for launching carbon farms, man-made ecosystems with increased sequestration capacity.

Other agrarian carbon polygons, whose main tasks are soil measurements and technologies for long-term fixation of atmospheric carbon dioxide in soil, operate in the Chechen Republic (“WAY CARBON”) and the Republic of Tatarstan (“CARBON-Povolzhye”).

The ranges at sea

In November 2021, the first offshore carbon dumpsite, Rosyanka, opened in the Kaliningrad region. Its operator is the Kant Baltic Federal University. The project participants are the Kant Institute of Oceanology named after P.P. Shirshov. It is operated by Kant Baltic Federal University and the project participants are the Shirshov Oceanology Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Forest Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The polygon with a total area of 255.4 hectares is located at two sites: the Wittgirren peat bog in the Slavský district and the eastern slope of the Gdańsk hollow in the Baltic Sea.

At the onshore site, scientists and students are working to assess the carbon balance of the peat bog and watering it down to increase the absorption of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. They test samples of peat, water and air using a mobile, solar-powered laboratory. At the offshore site, they are studying the temporal variability of carbon fluxes in the marine environment with regard to seasonality, developing methods for greenhouse gas emission and sequestration rates and technology for producing biofuels from algae biomass and marine debris.

Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Chernyshenko said that thanks to the creation of the Rosyanka polygon domestic scientists will receive “unique data for research and development of new technologies for assessing the carbon balance and sequestration of greenhouse gas emissions from the decay of drifting algae and marine debris”. He said it is important that not only scientists and students from BFU, but also staff from institutes of oceanology and forestry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as industrial and technological partners, will be working at the site. This will ensure that the most effective result is achieved as quickly as possible.

Other offshore carbon test sites have already been deployed in Krasnodar Krai in the Blue Bay of the Black Sea (“Gelendzhik”) and in Sakhalin region in the Aniva Bay of the Sea of Okhotsk (“Carbon Sakhalin”), with another being prepared for launch in Primorye in 2023.

From the steppes to the tundra

The geographical scope of the Ministry of Education and Science’s project provides unique data on the environment and carbon balance from all climatic zones in Russia, from the steppes in the south to the Arctic tundra in the north.

This year, the northernmost carbon test site in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Seven Lystvennitsy, started operating. Its task is to monitor the absorption capacity of ecosystems in relation to greenhouse gases, as well as testing and scaling methodological support for climate projects in the district.

The research site covered 2.4 thousand hectares of the Arctic forest tundra, but, as the project manager, Gleb Krayev, a leading researcher from the Arctic Research Centre, noted, the equipment installed there will allow to measure greenhouse gas flows and the carbon balance of adjacent zones — tundra, northern taiga and bog ecosystems of the Ob floodplain.

BioCarbon, currently the most southerly carboniferous landfill in the Novosibirsk region, covers over 1,000 hectares of lowland forest-steppe and piedmont taiga. It is being used to study the nitrogen and carbon balance of the forest-steppe landscape and to develop methods for setting up carbon farms in this area. By the end of 2023, it is planned to launch a carbon polygon even further south — in the steppes of Altai Krai.

Carbon leadership

The environmental agenda poses serious challenges to the Russian economy, but also presents additional opportunities. One of them relates to the development of international trade in carbon credits, or carbon units.

By 2023, EU countries plan to introduce a carbon tax for exporting companies that sell their goods on European markets. The tax will be calculated on the basis of the carbon emissions from the production of the goods. Each company will have a specific quota for the volume of sales of its products. Having used up such a quota, each company will buy a new one on the stock exchange from the companies which have not used up their own.

In the future, similar measures will inevitably be introduced on other markets. After all, the tasks of “greening” the economy are clearly formulated not only in Europe, but also in the Asian countries, to trade with which Russia is reoriented in the new reality, first of all in China. There, for example, back in July 2021 began trading in domestic quotas on carbon emissions for companies in the energy sector.

In the coming years, trade in carbon units will become a global phenomenon and leadership will go to those countries with a better developed nascent sequestration industry today. Ensuring that such an industry develops in Russia, and that the country eventually enters the global market for carbon units is another important objective of the Carbon Sequestration Project. The country could become a leader in this market because it has the largest carbon sequestration potential with the largest natural resource endowment on the planet.

Author: Ivan Bolotov
Cover photo: Ministry of Education and Science press service