The Environmental Assessment of Urban Agglomerations on the Basis of Sustainable Development Indicators

Abstract

The article discusses the indicators of sustainable development given from the standpoint of the classical concept of sustainable development. The methods used are analyzed to identify criteria for sustainable development. The indicators of sustainable development have been known and developed for a long time. However, their development did not take into account the regional fix, which would allow creating a permanent set of the most representative indicators for a certain territory. Volgograd and Rostov agglomerations are chosen as objects. A complex analysis of the regional indicators of sustainable development is carried out taking into account physiographic, climatic, sectoral features, the economic potential and ecological well-being of Volgograd and Rostov agglomerations. The work assesses the ecological and economic sustainability of the agglomerations under study, which allows to give the comparative analysis of the territory development predictive models. Today, it is still too early to talk about the effectiveness of achieving criteria for sustainable development in urban agglomerations. The accepted methods cannot be considered effective due to the fact that the efforts of all areas of management are needed. In the forecast, we can talk about a slight increase in the stability of Rostov agglomeration due to capital inflows. Taking into account current trends, Volgograd agglomeration can face a gradual decrease in sustainability requiring an immediate intervention.

The Approaches to the Development of Regional Frameworks of Sustainable Development Indices and Indicators

“…The developed regional frameworks of sustainable development indices, due to their differences, cannot be universal and require significant adjustments when apllied to other regions. Thus, regional indicator frameworks are being developed with rergard to the availability of statistical data and the selected approaches, [4,7,10,15].…”

“…In this study, statistical data on the Novosibirsk Region published in data books and available on the Rosstat official website were used to assess the sustainable development of the Novosibirsk region. Combining the indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals, analyzing the quality of available information, experience in developing sustainable development indicators of the Russian Federation regions [3,4,5,6,7,10] made it possible to focus on the following indicators of socio-economic development and the ecological state of the Novosibirsk region:…”