No abstract

Environmental and ecological statistics in Russia is still under formation. Despite the widespread recognition of the importance of providing economic growth within the environmental constraints, there continues to be significant lack of data that could be used to identify trends in the sustainable development, especially at the regional level. The authors argue that genuine savings, a complex indicator of sustainable development, could become such a statistic tool.The analysis shows that today Russia has gained extensive experience in assessing the sustainability of regional development using this indicator, but a comprehensive system for its assessment requires elaboration so that it could be established, as a regular practice in public administration.The article describes fundamental methodological issues of calculating the individual components of genuine savings through the current statistical accounting system in Russia. The paper considers conditions necessary to correctly estimate this indicator and ensure inter-regional and cross-country comparability of the results of such calculations.A version of the method for calculating genuine savings that is presented in this article requires an update of the system of statistical accounting in Russia. Practical application of this method along with the improvement of the system of statistical accounting shall allow for an adequate sustainability assessment of a particular region. This, in turn, shall provide a basis for establishing regional policies to compensate for resource depletion by investing in other types of capital.

The subject of the research is the ecological situation in 12 selected cities: Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, Lipetsk, Magnitogorsk, Mednogorsk, Nizhniy Tagil, Novokuznetsk, Norilsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Cherepovets and Chita. The purposes of the work are to analyze the structure, subjects, goals and objectives of the project “Pure Air” that is a part of a large-scale national project “Ecology”, as well as to evaluate the concrete character level of the proposed actions and their prospective effectiveness. In the course of the research only open sources of information, data of statistical organizations and relevant Ministries Departments were used. A conclusion is made about the large scale of the declared investment programmes of industrial enterprises (including heat-andpower enterprises) that will highly likely be fulfilled as they are carried out at the sole cost and expense of the enterprises. It is concluded in the article that complex plans to reduce emission of pollutants appear to be quite consequent and well-developed and they should lead to the achievement of the main project goal that is to reduce the total emission volume by at least 20%, and to change the load status of the cities under consideration from “very high” to “high”. If the majority of the actions planned is realized, the ecological situation in the selected cities will change significantly, which will allow to use the obtained experience in other Russian cities.