General Characteristics and Assessment of the Natural Resource Potential of the Russian Federation

. The solution of such fundamental tasks as stabilizing the economic development of the Russian Federation, coordinating the level of environmental and socio-economic development of the regions, solving a wide range of environmental and economic problems, developing the environmental culture of society and improving the professional training of specialists in our country has identified the need to introduce, develop and implement a universal system of environmental and economic education and training, covering the processes of pre-school education, secondary general education and professional training of specialists in secondary specialized and higher educational institutions in the Russian Federation.


Introduction
Environmental issues are becoming one of the priorities of international relations, along with international security and economic development. The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated this trend. One of the most important strategic projects for the EU's development in the coming decades is the European Green Deal, which aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. This ambitious initiative, even if not fully reflected in the announced parameters, is seen as a tool to pull the EU out of the current economic crisis and strengthen its competitiveness in the near future. In the US, the Joseph Biden administration has identified climate change as one of its top domestic and foreign policy priorities, and US leadership on climate change is seen as an important means to re-establish US 'global leadership' as a whole. Presumably, at the start of Biden's presidency, the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 will be announced. China has also begun to play an important role in global environmental and climate issues in recent years and has announced its intention to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060; environmental protection and climate change action issues also feature prominently in the work of key global governance bodies such as the G20 and BRICS. The growing importance of environmental issues on the international agenda is due to a number of factors, including the objective worsening of environmental problems, the decisive accumulation of environmental damage (increasing the risk of irreversible consequences) and the growing negative impact of natural degradation on the health and quality of life of people worldwide. Given the low cost of clean technologies, the benefits from large-scale development patterns, exploitation of nature and dirty industries are increasingly diminishing compared to the burden on health care, social security and insurance systems and people's quality of life. With the convergence of environmental and economic issues, the commercialization of natural capital, the transformation of 'green' (clean) technology into a factor of competitiveness for companies and countries, the global crisis of the current capitalist model based on endless consumption growth, the emergence of an ideological vacuum filled by 'green' ideologies, etc., the ecology of ecology is entirely and international security issues. Conservation could become the new universal ideology of humanity, capable of filling the vacuum created by the crisis of neoliberalism and the absence of a strong alternative, especially socialism, which is evident today. Environmental and climate issues have the potential to both integrate and divide. On the one hand, it could unite countries that differ greatly in values, political and economic development models, economic development and foreign policy orientation, and be one of the few countries today that can dialogue and cooperate with each other, even if their relations are often hostile. Such a unifying role on environmental and climate issues is particularly important in today's international relations in an environment of increasing complexity and conflict at both the global and regional levels. At the same time, climate and environmental issues are becoming an increasingly important part of these conflicts -a tool as well as a factor: Climate change measures promoted by the EU and other Western countries are discriminatory, reinforce Western economic dominance and the backwardness of developing countries, and intensify international conflicts. In particular, the EU's implementation of the 'Green Deal' threatens to worsen relations between Russia and the EU through widespread protectionism of European products.

Research Methodology
In the mid-1980s, there was a complete consensus among scientists, practitioners and the scientific community in our country that an economic approach to the management of nature management and environmental protection should be established. Since 1988, work on the creation of economic mechanisms in these areas has been significantly intensified. Nature protection commissions established at the federal, republican, regional, provincial, city and district levels began to prepare proposals for the creation of economic mechanisms for nature management and environmental protection. At the end of the 1980s, federal and Russian nature protection commissions began to prepare regulatory and methodological documents on the introduction of fees for environmental pollution. The preparation of these documents has begun. These payment fees included costs related to partial compensation for damage caused by environmental pollution, in accordance with the "polluter pays" principle. In the early 1990s, certain procedures for the payment of natural resources were adopted not only in the Russian Federation, but also in the Soviet Union as a whole, which contributed to the revitalization of the economy and more rational use of natural resources. It contributed to the revitalization of the economy and more rational use of natural resources. Payments for water use, four types of payments for the use of land resources, payments for the extraction of minerals and foam payments for the use of forest resources (harvested timber) were introduced. Given that economic incentives can be applied in two ways, positive and negative motivation, it was necessary to identify ways to ensure that those who use nature are directly involved in the implementation of environmental measures. The 1991 draft Law on Environmental Protection took all these considerations into account. In principle, there are three types of economic mechanisms for nature management and environmental protection, depending on the targeted impacts and nature. In reality, none of them is applied in isolation, but a reasonable combination exists.

Results and Discussions
The coronavirus pandemic has not led to a 'clean-up of nature', nor has it put environmental issues on the back burner. In some countries, particularly poor countries, nature conservation is certainly not a top priority during a pandemic. However, in many developed countries, at the ideological level, the coronavirus pandemic has taken the issue of environmental pollution to a new level, increasing its importance and turning it into a matter of national security. First, the degradation of the human environment not only continues to give rise to different types of epidemics, but also intensifies other transnational threats (migration, extremism, organized crime, terrorism, regional conflicts) and exacerbates other challenges to national development (poverty, deteriorating public health, lack of fresh water and food) and exacerbates other challenges to national development (poverty, deteriorating sanitation, shortages of fresh water and food). Without improving the human environment, which is the real issue, the state may not be able to cope with the burden on the health and social security systems that form the axis of its socio-economic problems. It is therefore necessary to protect nature not only from a moral and ethical point of view, but also from the point of view of national security and long-term economic viability. Second, the response of the ruling classes in many developed countries to pandemics has been to prioritize the value of human life, even if this is due to unsolvable problems or a desire to distance themselves from their own mistakes. In the spring of 2020, many developed countries will be more concerned about human life and public health than economic growth. They have effectively halted their economies, recognizing that protecting human life and public health is more important than economic growth. Today, many countries again favor economic growth, but the imperative of the value of human life proclaimed in the early days of the pandemic, fully coupled with the 'green' ideology, is giving new impetus to its development.
Third, the severe crisis of the global economy in 2020 reiterates the need for structural reforms to 'return to people and nature'. Understanding this and correctly linking environmental solutions with social and technological progress, most major powers will strive to develop clean technologies and strengthen their environmental ambitions. The economic crisis will not force the EU, the US and China to postpone their green development plans, but rather accelerate them by investing in green reconstruction prescriptions. The world's history of overcoming crises is summarized in the famous adage 'never let a good crisis go to waste'. Crises give us the chance to do things that were previously thought impossible." Crises are times of change and many can be programmed. If an economy needs to gain a new foothold, it should use crisis packages designed precisely for this purpose in times of crisis. This amount of government spending can only be mobilized in times of crisis.
At the heart of the development of the "green" agenda in Western countries is a broad coalition of interest groups. On the one hand, there are environmental organizations whose activities are most visible to the general public, which relate environmental issues to ethical aspects, including the context of responsibility to future generations. On the other hand, the green technology movement, driven by producers of clean technology, which has rapidly declined in price over the past decade, has become an attractive investment and is engaging the financial sector in green transformation. Quite often, corporations are funding the environmental movement for very practical benefits, such as image enhancement, and environmental groups are willingly or unwittingly becoming its lobbyists. At the same time, the "green agenda" is supported by the left, which sees environmental problems as a manifestation of the crisis of modern capitalism. At the same time, however, it is also close to some nationalists who strive to reduce dependence on hydrocarbon imports and prevent climate change migration. These interest groups often differ fundamentally on issues other than the environment, including their relationship with Russia. It is wrong to think of them as a single movement. As there are many such groups with complementary agendas to Russian interests, it makes sense to cooperate. Even in advanced developing countries, the return to nature has accelerated in recent years. Less conspicuous is the fact that its main supporters are not civil society, but states that see environmental problems as a brake on development, and corporations that are opening new markets. However, the moment is not far off when the resource and environmental limitations of economic growth will be recognized in these countries and, as a result, their economic development models will be reconsidered. In China, this process has already begun. The specifics of the environmental agenda vary from country to country. In European countries, climate change action is a top priority, and it is also an important issue in small island states and many African countries. More important priorities are urban air pollution in China, water resource depletion in the Persian Gulf countries, waste and unsanitary conditions in many African countries, and in India, where many environmental problems are closely linked to poverty. The different priorities for environmental issues in different countries are due to national circumstances and reflect different levels of public concern. The choice of priorities is important from the perspective of using the environmental agenda to integrate society, but tends to be secondary to the perspective of solving the problem itself, which in most cases must necessarily be solved as a whole. The "bottom-up" mode of solving environmental problems is flexible and adaptive. Perhaps, given the diversity of players and interests, it is more effective in involving the entire world in solving environmental problems than relying on traditional international institutions that establish clear rules of the game. The problem with such a regime, however, lies in coordinating the efforts of the parties involved and overcoming the many asymmetries between the motivations and interests of different countries and social groups, on the one hand, and the individual regional and national instruments of environmental policy, on the other, the global nature of the problem and its interrelatedness, a clear contradiction. In this regard, it is best to combine top-down and bottom-up approaches whenever possible.
Russia has the world's richest natural capital. It holds 6% of the world's oil reserves, 17% of natural gas, 18% of coal, 15% of iron ore, 4% of copper, 10% of nickel and 17% of rare earth metals. Also important are renewable resources, which have gained strategic importance in the 21st century. About 20% of the world's fresh water is located in Russia (mostly in Lake Baikal) and 20% of its forest resources. Russia accounts for about 9% of the world's arable land, but this area has decreased by more than 12% since 1990. Despite the fact that the catch of fish resources has decreased by about half since the end of the Soviet era, Russia ranks 6-7th in the world in this indicator and has shown the highest growth rate in the world over the last decade following reforms in the fisheries regulatory sector. Fishing catch. But more importantly, the ecological capacity of the Russian ecosystem significantly exceeds the ecological footprint of the Russian economy, making Russia one of the world's largest environmental donors. But the abundance of natural resources has traditionally not contributed to the recognition of their value by Russian elites and society. To date, Russia has practiced a 'western frontier economy', so to speak, in which when one region runs out of natural resources, they are transferred to another. This is evidenced by the large number of oil wells abandoned despite high flow rates, the burning of associated oil and gas, which was widely practiced until recently, the widespread clearing of natural forests for industrial needs instead of their regeneration, and the fishing of fish stocks with the slow development of aquaculture. A large part of the territory of Russia is completely unaffected by human activity, but the regions where three quarters of the population live are highly polluted. Environmental problems in these regions have a negative impact on the health and quality of life of the population and act as a brake on economic growth.

Conclusions
After many years of secondary attention to environmental issues, in recent years there has been some turning point: the solution of environmental problems is increasingly seen as a priority of public policy. The priorities set within the framework of the project do not raise questions. The attempt to combine, within the framework of the national project, the solution of environmental problems with the tasks of technological renewal deserves approval, in particular, through the mechanism of the best available technologies. Advanced environmental policy instruments are being tested: in particular, within the framework of the Clean Air federal project, an experiment is planned on emission quotas in 12 cities based on summary calculations of atmospheric air pollution.
At the same time, after almost two years of the implementation of the national project, there are still few reasons for joy. The quality of execution of the national project "Ecology" is the worst among all. In particular, the introduction of an air quality monitoring system is being delayed. The task of ensuring the level of recycling and disposal of waste at the level of 60% by 2024 is failing: today it does not exceed 7%. Many questions arise regarding the principles of compiling the best available technology guides: many of the technologies listed in it are significantly outdated compared to advanced foreign counterparts. There is a gradual reduction in the financing of the national project, and, given the low quality of its cash performance, in the coming years it may accelerate. The international direction of Russia's environmental policy also does not correspond to its potential and competitive advantages. Russia is a party to dozens of international environmental agreements, but in fact it does not play a key role in any of them. Within the framework of the G20 -the largest forum that considers environmental issues as a priority -Russia is also far from promoting its own environmental agenda.