Problems of Sustainable Land Use in Russia

    Issues related to the conservation of the environmental potential by economic methods have acquired special importance in recent years. This is due to the fact that nearly all economically advanced states consider addressing environmental problems as a pre-requisite for their sustainable and successful development.
    Russia possesses huge land assets with an area of 1.7 billion hectares. How-ever, the contribution of these assets to the economic progress is not large.
To eliminate discord between short-term economic gains and long-term sustainability challenges, we need to develop and implement special economic and legal tools that would encourage sparing and nondepletive, or sustainable, land use.
    Transfer to sustainable land use may be implemented through implementa-tion of a region-based environmental and economic land use regulation system – a system of uniform methodological principles for conducting land-use and environmental policies that would allow one to use economic and legal tools for regulating land management aimed to tackle environmental issues in the region and, simultaneously, raise the effectiveness of available land resources. Such system would help promote balanced development in the region for the benefit of all communities and, at the same time, secure property rights to land and provide additional guarantees to individuals whose interests might be infringed by town-planning or investment decision-making and ensure such priorities as human life and health protection as well as protection of land and other elements of the environment.

    O.E. Medvedeva
    State University of Management