Ensuring railway safety on a national scale: national and international experience

The article considers the main measures to create safety conditions in railway transport in foreign countries and compares them with the methods of safety provision by the domestic carrier JSC “Russian Railways”. It is noted that today Russia has its own practices for maintaining a level of security, but that alternative foreign approaches would improve the level of protection. The author analyses accident data and proposes additional measures to reduce the number of accidents. Scenario modelling and the integrated situation analysis method have been proposed as a method for selecting measures to ensure safety and improve the situation in the railway transport sector.

Long-term forecast of forest ecosystem services under different forest use scenarios

Sustainable forest management presupposes a long-term strategic planning of status and use of all forest resources and ecosystem services. The results of long-term scenario modelling can form the basis for decision-making. The paper contains the discussion of the results of scenario modelling run with the FORRUS-S imitational model for the period of 125 years and the rent forest plot with the area of 19,800 ha. Three scenarios of management activities differing in volumes of harvested timber, reforestation, and thinning were implemented. The effect of forest use scenarios on tree species composition, structural indices of forest ecosystems, volumes of food resources, and recreational potential was examined. The scenario envisaging a complete use of permissible harvesting volume and reforestation with no thinnings proved to be the most disastrous for aforementioned ecosystem services, including timber harvesting. The intensive forest use scenario envisaging artificial reforestation and complete cycle of thinnings causes the least negative effect on the volumes of food resources and even increases their diversity. Recreational ecosystem services degrade with increasing intensity of forest use. As a result, the forest user receives several scenarios; the choice of the optimal one for the user depends on the demand for concrete resources or ecosystem services.

Extension of Energy and Transport Scenario Modelling to Include a Life Cycle Perspective

The paper outlines the methodology for the extension of the assessment of transport scenarios to include a life cycle perspective. When considering greenhouse gas emissions in the operational phase, the inclusion of the upstream chain increases emissions in conventional systems by only 17% to 19%. In transport systems that utilise a large share of electricity generated predominantly from renewable energies without direct emissions, this value can rise sharply. In the present case, up to 304%. The emissions currently associated with the production of the transport fleet correspond to 56 Mt CO2e and thus 22% of total emissions. In most scenarios, however, this value decreases more slowly than the operational emissions. This increases the share of emissions caused by production. Thus, the inclusion of life cycle emissions is an important component for assessing sustainability.

Exploring Options for Public Green Space Development: Research by Design and GIS-Based Scenario Modelling

Green spaces have a positive influence on human well-being. Therefore, an accurate evaluation of public green space provision is crucial for administrations to achieve decent urban environmental quality for all. Whereas inequalities in green space access have been studied in relation to income, the relation between neighbourhood affluence and remediation difficulty remains insufficiently investigated. A methodology is proposed for co-creating scenarios for green space development through green space proximity modelling. For Brussels, a detailed analysis of potential interventions allows for classification according to relative investment scales. This resulted in three scenarios of increasing ambition. Results of scenario modelling are combined with socio-economic data to analyse the relation between average income and green space proximity. The analysis confirms the generally accepted hypothesis that non-affluent neighbourhoods are on average underserved. The proposed scenarios reveal that the possibility of reaching a very high standard in green space proximity throughout the study area if authorities would be willing to allocate budgets for green space development that go beyond the regular construction costs of urban green spaces, and that the types of interventions require a higher financial investment per area of realised green space in non-affluent neighbourhoods.