The Climate Center opened at NSU

Within the framework of the International Forum for Technological Development "Technoprom — 2021", the Climate Center of Novosibirsk State University was opened. The event was attended by the Minister of Science and Higher Education Valery Falkov.



One of the goals of the NSU Climate Center is to unite the efforts of interaction between science, the region and business to develop technological solutions to increase carbon sequestration and accounting, and to economically test these solutions. The visible measure of the success of this activity will be the international certification of results and the release of carbon credits.

— The low-carbon agenda is extremely relevant. In the coming years, it is important for the world community to switch to a fundamentally new type of economy — a low-carbon one. This transition requires technology. Of course, this is an over-ambitious task, but NSU aims to be a leader in the development of such technologies for restructuring our economy. And that is why the Climate Center was created on the basis of the university, — noted Dmitry Churkin, Vice-Rector for Research Activities at NSU.

During the presentation, Dmitry Churkin presented four main areas of the center's activities: launching a carbon landfill, creating a carbon-neutral campus, managing the region's carbon balance and developing decarbonization technologies themselves.

Work on the creation of the landfill began at the end of 2020. The first result of his work was the assessment of the biodiversity of forests and soil in the Novosibirsk region. This information will help when launching a carbon farm — an area in which special technologies increase the absorption of carbon dioxide and the production of carbon units. At the moment, five land plots around Novosibirsk with a total area of ​​20,000 hectares have already been selected for the farm.

The Climate Center is already being implemented as a networked interdisciplinary project in collaboration with research organizations and industrial partners. Thus, cooperation with Gazprom Marketing and Trading, which since 2008 has been engaged in the creation and trade of carbon units, will allow the center to obtain expertise from international organizations, as well as access to the international carbon market.

Another partner of the center is Sakhalin State University, together with which NSU launched the project of the Network Interregional Competence Center for Decarbonization Technologies. The center's work is to combine the efforts of the Novosibirsk Academgorodok as a developer of complex scientific and technological initiatives and requests of the Sakhalin Region as a pilot region aimed at implementing a strategy to achieve carbon neutrality and developing large-scale decarbonization projects. The results obtained by NSU specialists will be tested in the Sakhalin Oblast Ecopolis project.

The work of the center requires powerful analytics and mathematical modeling competencies. Therefore, the NSU International Mathematical Center joined the development of climate projects. At the opening, the "carbolator" was presented — a carbon footprint calculator that allows you to calculate the annual CO2 emissions depending on the lifestyle.

Valery Falkov noted that of the seven experimental regions and universities that are engaged in the development of decarbonization technologies, the project of the Novosibirsk region is the most elaborated.

— The Novosibirsk region and NSU entered the pilot project to create carbon polygons and farms in seven regions. In August, the thematic month of ecology and climate of the Year of Science and Technology, the process of launching landfills began. They are needed to create a scientific basis for monitoring greenhouse gases. Different ecosystems emit and sequester greenhouse gases in different ways. Our ecosystems have colossal absorbing potential and we need to understand how they work and what they can give to solve a global problem — climate change. The carbon farm is the prototype of a new industry, a specific tool for obtaining carbon units. I am glad that Novosibirsk State University is developing this direction, — said Valery Falkov.