The mechanism to assess environmental damage caused by production activities
The environmental factor always has a negative effect on the profits of an enterprise and creates a threat of crisis. Environmental constraints determine the appearance of financial flows, such as payments for the use of natural resources, payments for environmental pollution, environmental fines, costs of environmental protection measures and resource-saving technologies implementation. The Russian practice of accounting for such flows is imperfect. These flows are often calculated only to the extent of regulatory costs (construction of treatment facilities, fees for use of natural resources), and do not include possible environmental risks. The paper presents an evaluation mechanism of both permanent and emergency environmental impact of industrial activity, and presents measures to reduce environmental risks and prevent crises in the environmental subsystem of an enterprise. We propose a model to assess total environmental costs as a sum of environmental payments for polluted atmosphere, contaminants discharged into waters and disposed wastes; environmental fines paid by an enterprise; cost of amortization of funds of the environmental subsystem, its operation and development. We have considered the effect of accidents and man-made disasters in the environmental subsystem of an enterprise as a part of the subsystem of a more general type (region). The paper presents a scheme of the environmental subsystem interaction with regional structures and two sets of measures aimed at ensuring stable functioning of the environmental subsystem. Firstly, these are the measures aimed at reducing the risk of a situation, in which the existing environmental initiatives would be insufficient. Secondly, they include the measures aimed at increasing the technical reliability of the equipment of the environmental system. In addition, we have described the possibilities of using insurance tools as a method of mitigating environmental risk, enhancing environmental safety and compensation for damages of third parties, as well as compensation for the loss of the insured party.