On negative aspects of environmental and other non-profit organizations’ activities under conditions of global challenges and threats

Subject. This article considers the activities of international environmental and other non-profit organizations, in the context of continuing economic integration of countries. Their humanitarian reputation, potential, and pervasiveness are increasingly being used by the West in unfair competition in the markets for natural resource extraction and territory development. Objectives. The aim is to identify and assess possible threats to the economic security of the State, associated with the activities of environmental and other non-profit organizations in its territory. Methods. The study employs the dialectical method, systems approach, and tabular interpretation of empirical and factual information. In view of little knowledge of the problem in economic science, for our empirical reasoning and hypotheses, we perform the analysis of resonant examples of the influence of international organizations on economic processes in the State. Results. We examined negative aspects of activities of environmental organizations, potentially posing a threat to the economic security of the State. We analyzed examples that confirm the illegal actions of such movements, predicted their possible consequences, assessed resonant situations associated with the functioning of Greenpeace, WWF, and attempts to establish external control over political, social, and economic projects of the State. Conclusions. International non-profit organizations have a direct impact on government processes in the Russian Federation. It is important to establish and develop national environmental structures, implement awareness-raising activities, and support domestic science.

“It Is Like We Are Living in a Different World”: Health Inequity in Communities Surrounding Industrial Mining Sites in Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and Tanzania

Background: Health equity features prominently in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, yet there are wide disparities in health between and within countries. In settings of natural resource extraction (e.g., industrial mines), the health of surrounding communities is affected through myriad changes in the physical, social, and economic environment. How changes triggered by such projects translate into health inequities is poorly understood. Methods: This qualitative study explores potential layers of inequities by systematically coding perceived inequities of affected communities. Drawing on the framework method, we thematically analyzed data from 83 focus group discussions, which enrolled 791 participants from 10 study sites in Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and Tanzania. Results: Participants perceived inequities related to their individual characteristics, intermediate factors acting on the community level, and structural conditions. Due to environmental pollution and land loss, participants were concerned about unsecured livelihoods. Positive impacts, such as job opportunities at the mine, remained scarce for local communities and were claimed not to be equally distributed among community members. Conclusion: Extractive industries bear considerable risks to widen existing health gaps. In order to create equal opportunities among affected populations, the wider determinants of health must be considered more explicitly in the licensing process of resource extraction projects.

Contractual Systems in the Oil and Gas Sector: Current Status and Development

Production activities in the oil and gas industry are capital-intensive and associated with high technology, with these assets not always being available to oil-producing countries or national companies. Any form of interaction between the parties involved in natural resource extraction requires clear regulation regarding contractual relationships. This study attempts to analyze Indonesia’s production sharing contract system in order to assess its applicability to other conditions. The article covers the key aspects of contract theory, provides a classification of contractual systems in the oil and gas sector, and discusses the most common types of contractual agreements. It also considers the key principles of production sharing contracts (PSCs), analyzes the development of PSC practices in Indonesia over the past sixty years, and highlights PSC advantages and disadvantages.

When Extracting Is Not Subtracting: Accounting for Organism-technologies as Stakeholders in Microbial Resource Extraction through an Experiment in Discursive Biomimicry

This paper concerns how digitizing biological resources enables disentangling information technologies from biological bodies and, thus, from response-abilities among creatures from which they are derived. Extracting (digital) information from (biological) bodies makes it possible to stabilize, freeze, circulate, and control that information independently from creaturely activities—multiplying, not subtracting from the originating material. Such extractions tend to attenuate human interdependencies with other creatures even while expanding the scope of their utility as resources, to the effect of limiting those who have a stake in their development to humans alone. Where conventional natural resource extraction does violence to places and those interdependent with them, digital resource extractions may instead do violence to human capacities to recognize and act on multispecies interdependencies. Here, I argue that choosing to realize connections among organisms and organismal resources makes it possible to envision how creatures may be stakeholders in their own development, with joined ethical and epistemic consequences. I trace that possibility through a case study of the essential laboratory yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae via the physical metaphor of snowflake yeast, an S. cerevisiae variant that maintains multicellular connections as it reproduces.

Space surveillance architecture: issues and challenges – an integrated approach

The object of this study is space surveillance activity and the information systems involved for actors and national security organizations. Near and Deep Space Surveillance areas are presented, the former dealing with artificial objects and the latter the inner planetary system, including asteroids and its exploration and exploitation. (Near Space includes the upper layers of the atmosphere (thermosphere, exosphere) and the magnetosphere up to the limits of the magnetopause (6–15 RE). Deep Space refers to the space after the magnetopause and practically up to the limits of the Kuiper belt, about 50 A.U.) Due to the different matter of each area, the two sectors cannot have a common system for surveillance. The ever-increasing interest in natural resource extraction from the asteroid belt, the Moon, and Near-Earth Objects, combined with the explosive growth of the number of satellite commercial applications, makes the development and interconnection of the two distinct sector systems a necessity. This study describes the surveillance systems, the available technologies and methods, and develops a comprehensive oversight proposal.