Comprehensive assessment of regional environmental protection measures by criteria of ecological effectiveness, economic feasibility and long-term sustainability

Abstract

The growth of environmental protection expenditure in Russian regions outpaces the improvement of environmental indicators, while the practice of assessing protection measures keeps the criteria of ecological effectiveness, economic feasibility and long-term sustainability separate. This raises the task of a single framework reducing the three criteria to a comparable quantitative form without losing their independent content. A three-criteria model of integral assessment is proposed, in which partial indices of effectiveness, feasibility and sustainability are computed from normalised indicators and aggregated with weights 0.40, 0.35 and 0.25; sustainability is measured through the discounted environmental effect and adjusted net savings. The calculation is performed on the data of a model industrial-agrarian region for 2019-2025 using coefficient, factor and scenario analysis. The integral index rose from 0.534 to 0.649 along a non-monotonic trajectory with a local decline to 0.536 in 2021; the decomposition attributes about 58% of the increment to effectiveness and only 16.5% to feasibility, while the scenario calculation records the net discounted effect vanishing at a rate of about 20.1% per annum. The leading contribution of effectiveness against lagging feasibility means that the region attains an environmental result at the price of declining returns on expenditure, and the achieved improvement remains vulnerable to the rising cost of capital.