Spatial-economic-ecological model for the assessment
of sustainability policies of Russian Federation
Start of the project: January 2009
End of the project: December 2011

Concept and objectives

The objective of the study is to develop and implement for Russia an integrated spatio-economic-ecological modelling approach, which represents the state-of-the-art in different areas of economic, transport, resource-use and environmental modelling, and can be used to assist policy makers in their choice of medium and long-term sustainability policies. This implies the following interrelated aims:

  • develop modelling approach, which represents the state-of-the-art in impact assessment modelling and corresponds the complexity of the sustainability issue
  • build consistent database necessary for the implementation of the developed approach for Russia
    construct the spatial-economic-ecological model for Russia
  • develop a set of sustainability indicators associated with the model, which allows for quantification of social, economic and environmental effects of sustainability policies 
  • use the model to assess the effects of a set of important sustainability policy measures in order to demonstrate the operation ability and reliability of the developed modelling approach

The SUST-RUS modelling approach will provide Russian and international community with the sound scientific support for formulating sustainability policies, which is characterized by a balanced integration between social, economic and environmental policy objectives. The use of the SUST-RUS approach will assist the implementation of the EU strategy for sustainable development in Russia as well as an efficient incorporation of the sustainability goals into the existing Russian policy tools on regional and federal levels. The SUST-RUS modelling approach represents the state-of-the-art in many different areas of knowledge and, hence, will be superior to other models available for Russia. 

We believe that there is an urgent need for the construction of the elaborate full-scale modelling tool for the assessment of the Russian sustainability policies. The sustainability is a complex notion and develops along the social, economic and environmental dimensions. In order to perform a consistent policy assessment it is necessary for all three dimensions of sustainability to be incorporated into the modelling tool. Our approach is to start from the standard general economic modelling framework and elaborate it further by including the environmental and social dimensions in accordance to the state-of-the-art European and international approaches.

Given the large geographic area of Russia and strong differences between the economic and social structure of its regions, we believe that it is necessary to incorporate the regional dimension into the policy assessment framework. For that purpose we have chosen the new economic geography methodology as a basis for the construction of the model.

The modelling approach allows for tackling the following important issues: rational use of available natural resources and land; differences in the economic development of Russian regions; efficient use of labour; environmental impacts of transportation, production and consumption activities distributed in space; analysis of inequality and poverty in the country; influence of international trade and delocalisation of economic activities of the EU upon the Russian economic development.

The major problem of sustainable development is the rational use of natural resources allocated in space such as minerals, water, land and ecosystem services. The use of most of these resources depends upon the allocation of production and consumption activities in space.  By incorporating the representation of geographically distributed consumption and production patterns into the SUST-RUS modelling framework, we will be able to account for the use of natural resources in the economy as well as to assess the effects of sustainability policies upon different Russian regions.

© 2009 SUST-RUS