The collapse of the USSR led to a decrease in greenhouse emissions into the Earth's atmosphere. A group of scientists from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Russia and the United States came to such conclusions. A corresponding study by specialists was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, briefly reported by Physics World.
Scientists argue that as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union due to a drop in agricultural production, greenhouse gas emissions into the planet's atmosphere in 1992-2011 decreased by 7.61 billion tons, which is comparable to the consequences of human destruction of forests in Latin America.
According to experts, we are mainly talking about the farms of Russia and Kazakhstan.
“After the collapse of the USSR, the transition from a planned to a market economy had serious consequences for the agricultural sector and food systems in the region. Rising prices and low purchasing power have led to a decline in [the population's] consumption of meat, especially beef,”said Florian Schierhorn of the Institute for Agricultural Development in a country in transition in Halle, Germany.
The authors note that in the first decade after the signing of the Belovezhskaya Agreements (in December 1991), the number of cattle and pigs in the territory of the former USSR has almost halved. Scientists note that the region has not yet regained lost agricultural production, partially offsetting its needs for red meat by supplying products from South America.
In July 2017, it was reported that, according to scientists from the Vladimir Sukachev Institute of Forest of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS), by the 2080s, global warming will make Siberia an attractive place to live, and the region itself will become suitable for thermophilic crops - fruits. watermelons, berries, corn for grain and some grape varieties.
Over the past 200 years, human activities have emitted more than 600 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. At the scale of the entire atmosphere, this led to an increase in the content of carbon dioxide in it, which, along with methane, is considered one of the main greenhouse gases, by about 0.012 percent, and provoked an increase in the average global air temperature by one degree Celsius (by 1.5 degrees - on the continents).