Vol 89, No 4 (2019)

In the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century, humanity faced serious manifestations of space hazards, the most topical problem among which is space debris. Specialists in space activities deal with it every day and fully realize it. An ever-increasing focus is also made on the unpredictable behavior of our main star, the Sun, and the so-called space weather. The asteroid–comet hazard counts as the most catastrophic in scale. Real manifestations of biological hazards have not been observed thus far, although they become increasingly important as space activities develop. The time scale of astrophysical hazards is millions of years long; therefore, it is of no interest from a practical perspective. This article briefly describes the main types of space hazards. The author analyzes the organization of research and activities in this field. Comparative analysis leads to the unambiguous conclusion of the need for a national program of studies on space hazards and the avoidance of space threats. This article is based on a paper read by the author at a meeting of the RAS Presidium on January 15, 2019.

This article is devoted to the results and consequences of land and agrarian reforms in Russia and to defining the main guidelines for improvement of land policy. The dynamics of the ownership structure, ratio of management forms, and structure of land use of agricultural organizations indicate the incompleteness of land transformations. Assessment of the modern public land policy indicates its uncertainty as regards a number of critical positions and the inadequacy of the land management system concerning the requirements of the country’s socioeconomic development. Its inefficiency has led to a lack of information on the composition and quality of land potential, accelerating degradation of agricultural land, criminalization of land relations, insecurity of small agribusiness, unprecedented growth of latifundia, and other negative trends.

The proportion of agricultural land areas involved in cadastral registration is a little more than 20%, and the boundaries of administrative-territorial units have not been established, which gives rise to many land disputes and nonobservance of the rights of agricultural producers. The destruction of institutions for forecasting and planning the use and protection of land, land management, monitoring, detailed design for land improvement, and anti-erosion organization of the territory have led to desertification of large areas, development of water and wind erosion, soil salinization, and other negative processes. The implementation of a system of urgent measures is proposed to improve the current situation.

Foreign experience has shown that close interaction with the national scientific diaspora is imperative to reinforce the scientific and technological potential of society. Academic studies have established specific traits of the global circulation of scientific personnel, including fruitful cooperation between emigrant scientists and the donor country. By the example of China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Iran, this article shows the successful experience of developing a systems policy relative to national scientific diasporas. As for Russia, the state’s measures in this respect are uncoordinated and inconsistent. Proposals for widening cooperation with the Russian scientific diaspora are formulated.

The results on the representation of Russian publications in the global array of publications on narrow thematic trends are presented for the entire post-Soviet period against the backdrop of the ranking in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC). The Web of Science Categories classifier was used for search and subsequent analysis. Of the 252 WoS CC subject categories, results on 132 scientific trends were obtained in which the share of Russian publications in 2010‒2017 was no less than 0.4% of the global flows in the respective disciplines. As a result, it was discovered that Russia had gradually been restoring its positions, lost after 1993‒2000, in the global rating of countries by the number of publications in the WoS CC. At present, positive changes are observed both for the entire array of Russian publications and as differentiated by narrow scientific subjects. It has been discovered that Russia reached its maximal positions in the ranking in 1993‒1999, while the greatest decline, when the share of Russian publications was minimal, fell to 2011–2014. Data about the scientific trends in which Russia has been among the top ten countries by the share of publications in the global array over the entire post-Soviet period are presented. This list somewhat widened from 2010 through 2017 and now comprises 39 trends in which Russia is among the Top-10; in eight knowledge areas, it is among the top five countries.

The problem of the evolution of the surrounding world is one of the most important issues for science in general and has been exercising the minds of scientists over several thousand years. In the opinion of the author of this article, one of the reasons is that science has not disclosed thus far the constructive function of water in the formation of the Earth’s external envelopes, which was determined by its antagonistic contradiction with basalts and, later, simple products of photosynthesis. Nonequilibrium is the main factor of all evolutionary processes, which ensures the creation of new environmentally equilibrium formations, including more complex ones. However, the water cycle, which determines the ingress of new portions of water into the system, continuously, violating equilibrium, produces additional complications, leading to the acceleration of the evolution of V.I. Vernadsky’s “water‒rock‒gas‒organic matter (living and nonliving)” system. Water provides for unity in the behavior of inert and living matter.

The basic principle of the term “sustainable development” consists in improving the quality of human life without destroying the natural environment (biosphere). Sustainable development is implemented when society consumes renewable (air, water, landscapes, biota) and nonrenewable (combustible, ore, and other minerals) natural resources of the Earth. The most important condition for sustainable development is the continuous renewal of life-sustaining resources, but now environmental management is developing without complying with this requirement, which inevitably leads to the depletion of resources, degradation of ecosystems, and a global ecological disaster. This paper discusses indicators of the current consumption of life-sustaining resources, which surpass permissible limits, and ways to prevent the impending catastrophe. A conclusion is made about the need for a transition to a fundamentally new strategy of environmental management based on rational consumption and reproduction of resources, as well as about the relevance of developing technologies for producing energy from nontraditional sources.

The author spells out the concept of “labor potential” taking into account modern scientific methods and reflects on its formation features in terms of the second wave of population decline. This paper studies the main directions of employment expansion due to increased participation in the labor force of separate social and demographic groups of the population, specifically youth, people with disabilities, and pensioners. The specificity of structural shifts in employment in comparison with developed Western countries is revealed. The role of remigration and external and internal labor migration in achieving a balance between demand and supply of labor is noted. Proposals for the main directions of development strategy and use of labor potential are formulated.

This article reviews the most well-known tools for quantifying the effects of trade wars. The most highly cited works on mathematical models that simultaneously consider the economic systems of several states participating in international relations are analyzed. The analysis showed some bias of the results in favor of certain countries and a lack of consideration of the specific features of the economic systems of most of the subjects under study. We will present information about the model complex being developed for evaluating the effects of intercountry trade wars and the results of its use for calculating measures taken by other countries against Russia and China in the next article.