Monitoring-based assessment of environmental pollution in regions of the Russian Federation

Abstract

Abstract The article assesses the environmental pollution level in urban areas of the Russian Federation regions. Environmental monitoring data were used as data sources. For each Russian region the environmental pollution level was considered as the sum of pollution indices for the basic environmental media: air, surface water and soil. It allowed ranking regions and grouped them into categories (from extremely high polluted to extremely low ones). The air pollution monitoring network in cities and industrial centres does not cover all regions of the country, leading to undetermined air pollution level in 12 of 85 regions and thus to underestimated environmental pollution level there. The paper proposes to use the monitoring network data of the snow cover chemistry for the air pollution assessment in problematic regions and more accurate calculation of the environmental pollution level in them. Based on the air monitoring data for 2018 we revealed regions with high and extremely high levels of air pollution, their list was added after analyzing the snow cover chemistry data. As a result, the total assessment of environmental pollution was recalculated upward.