ECO-SPACE (Sustainable Development, Environmental Education, and Environmental Safety)

Ensuring environmental safety is a system of actions to prevent the occurrence and development of environmentally hazardous situations and to mitigate their consequences, including long-term ones. It includes a combination of political, organizational, socio-economic, financial, informational, legal, technical, and other means developed and implemented to prevent, identify, and timely eliminate internal and external natural, man-made, and environmental threats (and the possible consequences of their action).

The goal of environmental education is to draw attention specifically to the environmental component of sustainable development, namely to teach people to consciously protect the environment and care for it through education.

There is an interaction between sustainable development and the educational environment. Environmental education lays the foundation for sustainable development; that is, sustainable development is rooted in environmental education, which forms environmental consciousness. A proper policy to reduce environmental problems will not yield significant results without considering the role of education. Education can contribute to ensuring environmental sustainability by adding new information about environmental protection, as well as additional knowledge and skills.

Taking into account the sequence of achieving goals, "education for sustainable development" can be defined as the process of forming a person's knowledge, skills, and abilities so that they can solve global problems in the social, economic, and environmental spheres now and in the future to support sustainable development goals.

The goals of ensuring environmental safety align with the goals of sustainable development, and the task of achieving environmental safety goals is the development and support of environmental education (Table 1).

Table 1 - Relationship between the goals of sustainable development, environmental safety, and education

The Implementation Plan for the Fundamentals of State Policy in the Field of Environmental Development of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2030 provides for a whole range of measures aimed at forming a comprehensive system for training specialists:

• development of educational programs for training and advanced training of students and specialists, as well as civil servants in the field of environmental protection, resource conservation, and ensuring environmental safety, taking into account the specifics of environmental protection activities in various sectors of the economy;
• preparation of modern literature in the field of environmental protection, resource conservation, and ensuring environmental safety;
• updating educational standards taking into account professional standards in the field of environmental protection.

The implementation of education plans for sustainable development will lead to the formation of new values and personal qualities oriented toward a responsible attitude toward both nature and society.

In Russia, current training programs (training, retraining, advanced training) do not fully meet modern goals and objectives, do not take into account legal documents adopted in recent years, including at the international level, and do not always ensure the training of specialists at the required level. This may manifest in the following:

• formal mention of the need to develop education in laws and policy documents without a clear mechanism, and without establishing measures, deadlines, and responsible executors;
• a formal approach to the introduction of environmental education into curricula and programs — the introduction of disciplines aimed only at forming knowledge about the environment, its basic laws, environmental problems, and methods of protection; a lack of focus on forming critical thinking, skills, and competence in the field of assessing environmental threats and solving environmental problems;
• a shortage of professionally trained teachers in the field of environmental education;
• a lack of state and private financial support to provide the educational process with textbooks, methodological literature, tools, and mechanisms aimed at obtaining and applying environmental knowledge.

Even with minimal compliance with all requirements, it is still worth acknowledging that traditional environmental education is aimed only at solving environmental problems. Meanwhile, education for sustainable development is aimed at the development of education and abilities in general, and only then at solving environmental problems.

Given globalization and the speed at which environmental threats spread, it is currently not enough to simply talk about the development of environmental education; we should move to a fundamentally new level — the greening of the entire educational system. The idea is that when receiving an education, almost all disciplines should contain environmental material. Environmental education must be restructured to strengthen a new approach to social relations with the environment, which in many countries is no longer perceived as an object, but as a living being that shares the same fate as humans.

In addition to general problems with the environmental education of the entire population, it is necessary to highlight subjects whose environmental education directly affects the state of environmental safety in the country and the world — these are individuals holding management positions related to making environmental decisions at enterprises. It is indisputable that environmental safety is an integral part of general safety during operations at facilities that pose a potential danger to the environment. This means that the executive must possess the necessary level of training to ensure the safety of their enterprise. Such executives can be recognized as subjects of environmental hazard — individuals whose activities can create an environmentally hazardous situation.

Given the increasing negative impact of industrial enterprises on the state of the environment, one of the main requirements for the executives of such enterprises should be training that is adequate for modern global environmental challenges and internal problems.

Ensuring environmental safety in an organization requires significant financial expenditures. Financing activities in this area consists of funding environmental protection measures: current (expenses for waste management, wastewater treatment, etc.) and capital (implementation of green business tools — costs for the construction, acquisition, reconstruction, and modernization of environmental protection facilities).

In case of non-compliance with requirements for ensuring environmental safety, and in particular for environmental protection, organizations suffer large financial losses, firstly, by paying administrative fines and, secondly, by compensating for damage caused to nature, both in kind and in monetary form. For example, the total volume of current environmental protection expenditures in the Russian Federation in 2017 by enterprises (in the "manufacturing" sector) amounted to 133,963.9 million rubles, or 41.7% of the total environmental protection current expenditures in the Russian Federation. Violations of environmental requirements resulted in fines totaling 7,673 thousand rubles. Damage caused to the environment amounted to 957,140.03 thousand rubles, and this was for only 131 instances of petroleum product contamination, which is approximately 1% of the total number of identified violations.

Thus, it is quite obvious that organization executives, in addition to specialized knowledge in their professional field, must undergo training (preparation, retraining, advanced training) in the field of ensuring environmental safety during production activities. Of course, these categories of citizens usually already have extensive experience in practical management work and specialized education. They have studied the basics of ecology, life safety, and the basics of law and economics. However, since receiving their education, they have acquired new work skills and encountered new operational features and complexities related to the need to ensure environmental safety. Therefore, to prevent environmental disasters and preserve human life on Earth, competent training of enterprise management is necessary. Furthermore, taking into account sustainable development goals, production methods are actively changing: new ways of ensuring economic growth with the minimum possible depletion of natural resources have appeared; and given neo-industrialization, additional training is required to transition from traditional production with a potential environmental threat to environmentally responsible production.

Enterprises headed by executives are called environmentally hazardous facilities. These are enterprises that, in the course of their economic activities, can have a negative impact on nature and humans. Most enterprises, depending on their economic activities, can be sources of various threats to individual natural objects and the natural environment as a whole.

A threat to environmental safety refers to types of economic or other activities that have a harmful effect on the environment and pose a danger to human life and health due to violations of environmental safety requirements.

Table 2 presents the types of objects (enterprises) that pose a threat to environmental safety and the potential consequences that occur in case of violation of environmental requirements.

Table 2 - Correspondence of environmental threats to business facilities depending on their hazard level

Based on the table data, we can conclude that environmentally hazardous facilities pose threats of varying degrees of danger to nature and humans.

Therefore, for the executives of each enterprise (facility), general training in the field of environmental safety is necessary, and in some cases (for particularly hazardous facilities), additional or special training is required, as well as executive certification (Table 3).

Table 3 - Correspondence of executive training programs to environmentally hazardous facilities

According to the requirements of Article 73 of Federal Law No. 7-FZ dated January 10, 2002, organization executives and specialists responsible for decision-making in the course of economic and other activities that have or may have a negative impact on the environment (hereinafter referred to as specialists) must have training in the field of environmental protection and environmental safety.

During the general training of executives and specialists for the purpose of ensuring environmental safety, it is necessary to focus on legal, economic, technical, and other environmental issues required for the executive to perform their duties. The training program usually includes the following sections:

• Russian legislation in the field of environmental protection and environmental safety;
• economic development and the environmental factor (environmental economics);
• environmental control and monitoring;
• environmental management and auditing;
• enterprise documentation in the field of environmental safety.

Every 3-5 years, executives and specialists must undergo advanced training in this area. The purpose of advanced training is to update knowledge, principles, and management practices in accordance with changing legislative requirements for ensuring environmental safety.