Lands and Soils As Self-contained Components of the Environment: Issues of Assessment, Regulation, and Management (Review)

No insight has been gained to date into distinguishing between functions of soils and lands in assessment, load rationing, and management of their quality in either the scientific or productive spheres, which leads to confusion of ideas and a certain amount of guesswork in modern land-use and environmental-protection management. The study deals with characteristics of functioning of soils and lands as “independent” separate components of the environment in terms of their assessment and quality-regulation system established by the law “On Environmental Protection.” There is a certain scientific, as well as regulatory and procedural, lack of provisions with respect to the developed parameters of integrated assessment of environmental components included in the natural complex of lands, industrial and residential lands, in particular. The paper generalizes conception of permissible quality parameters of soils and levels of their anthropogenic exposure. Particular attention is paid to the issues of standardization of lands along with development of ideas on establishing the ambient natural and natural-anthropogenic background of soils, as well as the associated features of assessing the soil quality on lands of various economic uses. The paper touches upon matters of the specific threefold of functioning of lands based on the development of ecological, resource-based, and socioeconomic constituents. At the same time, the analysis of socioeconomic regulation of land quality contributes to a selection of the optimal direction in organizing a sustainable development of a territory and functioning of the entire natural-resource complex of land. It appears relevant to focus on development and adoption of the Federal Law “On Soil Protection” to distinguish between concepts of “soil” and “land” at the scientific and practical levels related to peculiarities of their assessment, rationing, and management.