When the USSR collapsed, agricultural production collapsed too. Imports of food from the west, however, increased dramatically. As one scholar put it, “foreign foodstuffs both raw and processed flooded Russia’s marketplace.” Millions of hectares of cropland were abandoned and recovered by forest and plants – something that we can deem to be a direct environmental benefit.

However, there was an indirect one. The growth of forests and herbaceous plants allows for carbon sequestration to take place. Carbon sequestration through forest growth is the process by which growing trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, convert it into biomass via photosynthesis, and store it in their tissues mitigating the effects of greenhouse gases and contributing to climate change mitigation. The scale of land abandonment in the former USSR was so important that some scholars argue it was large enough to impact continental and global carbon budgets. Essentially, it caused a carbon sink that mitigated the effects of some of the growth in global greenhouse gas emissions.

How big of a sink was it? One study finds that carbon absorption in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine between 1990 and 2017 represented 1 gigaton of carbon. Another study, which focused only on Russia and Kazakhstan, found roughly similar effects and gave an idea of its significance by pointing out that it was sufficient to “compensate annually about 36 percent and 49 percent of the current fossil fuel emissions in Russia and Kazakhstan, respectively.”

[I’m mainly kidding with the headline. However, if this stuff is important to you, then you should have Reagan and Bush 41 posters all over your walls. In fact, that’s not a bad idea, regardless. — Ed]