Yet Another Benefit from USSR’s Disintegration – Large Reduction in Release of Greenhouse Gases

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 25 – The end of the Soviet Union brought many benefits, but one that has not attracted much attention up until now is that its demise has resulted in a significant decline in the release of greenhouse gases as a result of changes in post-Soviet food systems, a new study by Russian and Western scholars says. 

            Published in the Environmental Research Letters series and available online at iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab1cf1, the study says that as a result of the decline in agricultural production in the former Soviet space, the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere between 1992 and 2011 was some 7.61 billion tons.

To get some idea of how large that figure is in terms of its impact on global warming, the scholars say, it is roughly “comparable to the destruction by man of the forests in Latin America.” 

            The study has attracted some attention, but it deserves to be more widely known given many believe that the demise of the USSR had a largely negative impact on the environment. (For examples of coverage in the post-Soviet space, see charter97.org/ru/news/2019/6/25/339097/ and kavkazcenter.com/russ/content/2019/06/24/118243/raspad-sssr-okazalsya-blagom-dlya-vsego-mira-zayavili-uchenye.shtml.)