Review of approaches to ecological and economic modeling and assessment of the effects of the development of transport and transport infrastructure on environmental indicators of territories

Abstract

The main theoretical and empirical approaches to modeling the interaction between socioeconomic indicators and anthropogenic load on the environment are considered. The most common approaches to measuring the environmental load on territories and population are environmental models IPAT, STIRPAT, modeling the impact of socio-economic characteristics on the environment. Extension of the models also allows taking into account the characteristics of the transportation industry and modeling their impact on the volume of emissions from road transport. According to economic studies, road infrastructure development has a dual impact on the environment. While better infrastructure can help reduce emissions from road transport, it also stimulates economic activity and travel demand, which increases emissions. The emission reduction effect of road network development is more likely to be observed in regions where infrastructure saturation exceeds the level needed to meet current, including latent, travel demand. Thus, the development of road transport infrastructure at a pace that outpaces the economic development of the region can contribute to reducing the environmental burden. In addition, approaches to analyzing causal relationships between variables and assessing the overall, direct and indirect effects of factors on ecology are discussed: structural modeling and path analysis based on the structure of a simple directed graph.

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