Assessment of the Assimilation Potential of Port Water Areas
Аннотация
The methodology of economic valuation of ecosystem services of the marine environment has been considered, which implies identification and valuation of the benefits obtained by humans from using marine ecosystems. It has been found that the previous research disregarded and did not assess the assimilation potential of port water areas, which consists in the absorption and dispersion of pollution that arise in the course of port activities. A methodological approach has been proposed for its assessment as well as an algorithm for calculating the rent-based assimilation potential by the amount of saving of expenses of economic entities that they do not pay to compensate for the damage caused or do not invest in its reduction and prevention, that is, by the amount of environmental damage caused by sea-going ships and port activities. The cost of the assimilation potential for the largest ports of Russia, the European Union (EU) and China has been calculated based on the monetized metrics of environmental damage applied in the EU countries and the indicator of pollutant emissions per 1 million tons of cargo transshipments carried out in ports, as well as the costs of cleaning polluted water discharged by ships. The latter value has been calculated only for the ports of Russia.