Carbon management (CM) domain in Russia is defined by carbon (C) sequestration potentials in vegetation and soil and options for C flux manipulations in line with regional indicators of the carbon cycle (CC).

During the past two centuries, human activities have undertaken a vast earth system modification of the carbon (C) cycle. Early during this period, humans have converted native vegetation to croplands. Such land use changes have mobilized massive amounts of C. During the past century, increased use of fossil energy sources, primarily coal and oil, have resulted in the rapid expansion of industry and technology throughout the world.  The resulting impact has been to greatly increase the atmospheric concentration of C dioxide (CO₂) to where in 2004 it is estimated to 375ppm, nearly 100 pm greater than the pre-industrial levels. Fossil fuel emissions and land use change have moved the global C cycle out of balance.

One option for reducing emissions of CO₂ to the atmosphere as a result of combustion of fossil fuels is to capture CO₂ and inject it into porous subsurface geologic formations.  High pressure CO₂ has been used for the last three decades as an agent for enhanced oil recovery, and hence considerable experience in the technical issues associated with predicting the movement of CO₂ in the subsurface has been accumulated.  Significant additional quantities of CO₂ could be stored in depleted oil and gas reservoirs if CO₂ were available at low cost.  These formations are appealing as storage sites because the subsurface is known to have a trap and seal that contains the buoyant oil or gas.

Analyses of Northern Hemisphere carbon fluxes indicate that a number of ecosystem processes jointly contribute to source and sink exchanges of CO₂ which affect the net carbon sequestered from the atmosphere. These processes (e.g., CO₂, N₂O, CH₄, and H₂O dynamics) exhibit high variability in time and space with the largest variability corresponding to human land management events. Therefore, the spatial and temporal incorporation of land management information is needed to properly represent net carbon and other GHG fluxes.

The paper presents major results of the terrestrial biota full carbon account (FCA) for a large region of Northern Eurasia based on a semi-empirical ecosystem-landscape approach and taking into account major requirements to a verified FCA. The average net ecosystem production (NEP) and net biome production (NBP) for the entire region are estimated for 2003 at 59 and 33 g C m^-2, respectively. It is shown that uncertainties of the regional FCA can be reliably estimated and decreased to an acceptable level if the information base and methodology used are based on a consistent systems approach.

An ocean general circulation model (OGCM) is used to simulate the direct injection of CO₂ near Tokyo. Our results confirm that direct injection can sequester large amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere when disposal is made at sufficient depth but show that the calculated efficiency is sensitive to the choice of physical model. Moreover, we show, in an OGCM and under a reasonable set of economic assumptions, that sequestration effectiveness is quite high for even shallow injections. However, the severe acidification that accompanies injection and the impossibility of effectively monitoring injected plumes argue against the large-scale viability of this technology. Our coarse-grid models show that injection at the rate of 0.1 Pg-C/yr lowers pH near the site of injection by as much as 0.7-1.0 pH-unit. We also show that, after several hundred years, one would effectively need to survey the entire ocean in order to accurately verify the inventory of injected carbon. These results suggest that while retention may be sufficient to justify disposal costs, other practical problems will limit or at best delay widespread deployment of this technology.

This paper provides background and summarizes evidence supporting the possibility of developing a low-cost mineral carbon dioxide sequestration technology.

Prognostic simulation of carbon sequestration and carbon management must provide for the influence of potential changes in future atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and climate on carbon cycle processes. The conventional approach is to use various scenarios of changes in atmospheric CO₂ and climate as external inputs to carbon cycle models. However, this approach decouples potentially important feedbacks between the carbon cycle and climate, and thus contributes uncertainty to the simulation of future carbon sequestration and the evaluation of carbon management options. Here we describe modeling results that analyze components of this uncertainty. We describe how coupling a carbon management model with a climate model in fully coupled climate-carbon simulations influences the analysis and interpretation of terrestrial ecosystem sequestration as an option for future carbon management.

The upwelling of nutrients from the deep ocean sets the flow rate of carbon moved by the biological pump by bringing nutrients to the photic zone. Here solar energy converts inorganic carbon to organic material that cannot communicate with the atmosphere. As a consequence of gravitational sinking, the majority of the carbon in the biological cycle is in the deep ocean isolated from the atmosphere and can be considered part of a closed cycle. Increasing the carbon flow of the biological pump, that is increasing the pumps capacity from its present value of 4.5GtC/yr, will have the effect of drawing carbon from atmosphere and the land to augment the cycle.

At present, approximately half of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are absorbed by the land and oceans [Jones and Cox, 2005], but climate changes may act to reduce this uptake, leading to higher CO₂ levels for a given emission scenario [Cox et al., 2000, Friedlingstein et al., 2005, in prep.]. Less attention has been paid to the potential impact of carbon cycle feedbacks on the emissions reductions required to achieve stabilisation (the so called “permissible emissions”), although this is arguably more pertinent to the issue of avoiding dangerous climate change in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate change.