Аpproaches to Assessment of the Natural Capital of Forests
The existing strategy of social and economic development in the majority of the countries of the world stimulates fast accumulation of the physical, financial and human capital at the expense of excessive depletion and degradation of the natural capital, which includes stocks of natural resources and ecosystems. Ecosystems are type of the natural capital, and the restored capital of an ecosystem depreciate if they are incorrectly used or spent too much. Depreciation of the natural capital is often irreversible; therefore, the extreme importance has to be given to assessment of forest resources. The offered global approaches to assessment of the natural capital of forests at the level of the certain countries, on the one hand, allow comparing forests by the most general parameters, such as area of the foretss, their stock, woodiness level and so forth, but on the other hand they fix the important changes in the basic principles of functioning of the forest sector in the conditions of the formed “green” economy concerning reasonable use of forest resources, their reuse, replacement of non-renewable materials with materials from wood. Nevertheless, global approaches allow estimating a quantitative condition of forests, but fail to estimate their high-quality and structural changes thanks to which it is possible to estimate degradation of forest ecosystems, as well as their depletion. The international methodological approaches, which have appeared in the last 2030 years and deal with estimates of the natural capital of forests and their depletion, pay much attention to environmental risks since an economic component of forestry and forest exploitation in the developed countries and also questions of reproduction of forests were regulated a long time ago. Therefore, relying on global approaches and also considering conceptual positions of international techniques, the work offers techniques of assessing the natural capital of forests and their depletion in the Republic of Komi.