Sustainable human exploitation of living marine resources stems from a delicate balance between yield stability and population persistence to achieve socioeconomic and conservation goals. But our imperfect knowledge of how oceanic oscillations regulate temporal variation in an exploited species can obscure the risk of missing management targets. We illustrate how applying a management policy to suppress fluctuations in fishery yield in variable environments (prey density and regional climate) can present unintended outcomes in harvested predators and the sustainability of harvesting. Using Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua, an apex predatory fish) in the Barents Sea as a case study we simulate age‐structured population and harvest dynamics through time‐varying, density‐dependent and density‐independent processes with a stochastic, process‐based model informed by 27‐year monitoring data. In this model, capelin (Mallotus villosus, a pelagic forage fish), a primary prey of cod, fluctuations modulate the strength of density‐dependent regulation primarily through cannibalistic pressure on juvenile cod survival; sea temperature fluctuations modulate thermal regulation of cod feeding, growth, maturation, and reproduction. We first explore how capelin and temperature fluctuations filtered through cod intrinsic dynamics modify catch stability and then evaluate how management to suppress short‐term variability in catch targets alters overharvest risk. Analyses revealed that suppressing year‐to‐year catch variability impedes management responses to adjust fishing pressure, which becomes progressively out of sync with variations in cod abundance. This asynchrony becomes amplified in fluctuating environments, magnifying the amplitudes of both fishing pressure and cod abundance and then intensifying the density‐dependent regulation of juvenile survival through cannibalism. Although these transient dynamics theoretically give higher average catches, emergent, quasicyclic behaviors of the population would increase long‐term yield variability and elevate overharvest risk. Management strategies that overlook the interplay of extrinsic (fishing and environment) and intrinsic (life history and demography) fluctuations thus can inadvertently destabilize fish stocks, thereby jeopardizing the sustainability of harvesting. These policy implications underscore the value of ecosystem approaches to designing management measures to sustainably harvest ecologically connected resources while achieving socioeconomic security.

No abstract

The prospects and trends for the development of border regions of the former Soviet Union have become one of the profound research areas in the field of economic geography recently. In the conditions of planned economy in the Republics of the USSR, a vertical system of industrial complexes was formed, with the focus on performing national economic tasks. There have been some significant changes in the border regions of independent post-Soviet States in the process of transition to the market economy model. The analysis of the industrial and territorial structure is done on the example of Russia and Kazakhstan. The formation of a common market on the basis of the Eurasian Economic Union allowed the border regions to make the most of their competitive advantage in attracting investments. The unique geographical particularity of the research object is manifested in the fact that there are no analogues of the longest land border in the world as between Russia and Kazakhstan. The new forms of production organisation are implemented in the border regions of the studied countries over more than 7,000 km. More than a quarter of a century later, transformation processes are clearly observed in the mining and manufacturing industries, agriculture, transport and services. As a result, the “regional asymmetry” of industrial development can be observed when manufacturing regions with high added value become the “cores” of economic development of cross-border relations between Russia and Kazakhstan.

Changes in the transport infrastructure in China, Asia and the Russian Federation go along with the main regional geo-economic trends of their development. The core of the suggested initiatives from China is the inclusion of Asian countries and Russia in the list of transit states in order to form alternative multimodal transport corridors in the direction «East-West» (China-EAEU-EU route). The present research deals with the problems of the development of logistics infrastructure in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) with the purpose of further improvement of transit opportunities in the delivery of goods from China to the European Union. The authors of the article take into consideration that the EAEU logistics infrastructure is an established and evolvable system which is formed under the influence of globalisation processes and regionalisation of the world economy. The unified transport system of the EAEU countries formed during the Soviet period needs modernisation. Modern conditions of transportation routes in EAEU are observed on the basis of the specific examples as well as the transformation and modernisation options of a transport vector in the direction of China-EAEU-EU. The main trends in the infrastructure development in Central Asia are reflected in the regional projects of railway and automobile communications with the integrational priorities. The development of logistics infrastructure is essential for the full realisation of the transit potential inherent in the integration within the Eurasian region.

The article considers the climate policy of the Baltic region countries. The reasons and factors for reducing CO2 emissions in the period 1990-2018 are analyzed, the relationship between the processes of decarbonization and the ecological transformation of farms are demonstrated. The EU influence on the climate policy of individual countries is studied. The features of evolution and the modern structure of the RES sector are explored. The assessment of measures to improve energy efficiency of national economies is given. According to the degree of climate policy efforts and the depth of the ecological transformation of national economies, a ranking scheme for the region countries is proposed.