Addressing climate change necessitates a shift in everyday social practices, which are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. While social media platforms are crucial for the emergence and dissemination of such practices, their role in the Russian context remains underexplored. This study employs a big data analysis to identify and systematize climate-related social practices discussed within Russian environmental online communities on the VKontakte platform. Using BERTopic topic modeling on a corpus of nearly 190,000 posts from 103 communities, followed by expert evaluation, we identified 80 distinct social practices. These practices were systematized according to actors, objects, and types of activities, revealing a rich ecosystem of grassroots initiatives focusing on waste management, sustainable consumption, education, and digital mapping. The findings demonstrate that online communities compensate for the lack of institutionalized citizen participation in Russian climate policy by fostering shared meanings and practical knowledge. The study concludes that these bottom-up practices represent a significant resource for climate policy, offering ready-made algorithms for behavioral change. We propose that public authorities leverage these communities to enhance public support and effectively implement climate mitigation and adaptation measures.

This paper investigates the content of Russian online communities dedicated to environmental issues. Social media platforms serve as key channels for information dissemination and public mobilization, providing a unique source for analyzing how environmental topics are represented in public debates. The study aims to trace the main directions of environmental discourse and to understand how digital communication reflects the spread of ecological knowledge and practices. To achieve this, state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) methods are applied to a large corpus of posts from environmental internet communities. Furthermore, the study compares how human experts and large language models (LLMs) assign labels to identified topics, allowing for an assessment of the potential of computational tools to support research in this field. This work contributes to both the social study of environmental practices in Russia and to the development of text analysis techniques for large online collections. The findings demonstrate the significance of combining expert knowledge with automated approaches to study complex social and ecological processes.

Естественно-научное образование в университетском блоке ядерных дисциплин

In the context of the scarcity of rare earth elements on the market, the question arises regarding the environmental feasibility of their extraction from secondary raw materials. The objective of this article is to compare the levels of negative environmental impact associated with the extraction of rare earth elements from primary and secondary raw materials, considering their entire life cycle. Through a systematic analysis of data from current scientific literature, the key ecological risks characteristic of extracting rare earth elements from different types of raw materials have been identified. In terrestrial mining, the greatest risks stem from landscape transformation and chemical pollution of the environment. Concerns are raised by the radioactivity of primary raw materials, the formation of waste rock dumps and tailings storage facilities, emissions of dust and acid gases, and discharges of suspended solids, metals, acids, and alkalis in wastewater. Marine extraction of rare earth elements from deep-sea sediments and ferromanganese nodules involves the same polluting substances but affects different recipient objects. Primarily, it threatens the destruction of unique deep-sea ecosystems and impacts the water column and surface layers. Moreover, the zone of impact on the marine environment is significantly more extensive than in terrestrial mining, due to the formation of suspension plumes. Additionally, there is a lack of experience in mitigating impacts and reclaiming marine ecosystems at great depths. Extraction of rare earth elements from production and consumption waste offers several ecological advantages: the absence of radioactivity issues, the proximity of raw material sources to major cities, and a reduction in waste burial volumes. Furthermore, obtaining rare earth metals from waste helps to decrease the volumes of mineral extraction (and associated ecological risks), reduce dependence on raw material imports, and balance the market by alleviating shortages of critical rare earth elements.

Today, the question of making consumption more eco-friendly is important both for consumers interested in purchasing environmentally friendly products (EFPs) and for producers interested in expanding the market for such products. However, there are still many “white spots” in this area, starting with the criteria for classifying products as environmentally friendly. The aim of this study is to identify the criteria for the environmental quality of products as perceived by the youth, using first-year students at the University of Tyumen as an example. The methodological basis of the research is the works of Russian and foreignscolars, revealing the characteristics inherent in EFPs, as well as the results of a survey of 741 students on types of EFPs and their attributes. The EFP concept is interpreted ambiguously in Russian-language sources – from a narrow understanding as products safe for human health to a broad understanding that also considers the impact of the product on the environment at different stages of its life cycle. Foreign sources have comprehensive definitions of EFP, as well as detailed lists of criteria for classifying products as environmentally friendly. The survey results show that students associate EFP with certain materials (obtained from plant raw materials, easily recyclable, produced from secondary raw materials). The main criteria for eco-friendliness in the students' responses are the following: multiple uses of the product, biodegradability, the possibility of recycling product waste, reducing the consumption of raw materials and pollution of the environment with harmful substances at the stage of production and use of the product, and reducing waste generation. Misconceptions about classifying certain products as EFP are also identified, leading to the conclusion that ecological education is necessary. The catalog developed to systematize students' responses, which includes 196 characteristics of EFP, can be used to study the understanding of EFPs by consumers in different market segments and to develop strategies to improve the ecological quality of products.

The enterprises of the oil and gas industry of the Russian Federation are one of the largest sources of negative environmental impacts; therefore, a comprehensive assessment of their ecological activities is necessary. The purpose of the study is to investigate the ecological activities of the subsoil user enterprises of the main oil and gas producing region of the country - Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug - Yugra, including activities related to the low-carbon transition. The article analyzes the open information on the environmental activities of eight oil and gas producing enterprises of KhMAO-Yugra for the period 2015-2019. A list of evaluation indicators is proposed that allows comparing oil and gas producing enterprises with each other and evaluating the main directions of their ecological activities, including those in the field of decarbonization of production. The key areas of ecological activities of the district’s enterprises are the reduction of pollutant emissions into the atmosphere, including through the utilization of associated petroleum gases, optimization of water use, as well as the fight against pipeline breaks. In the development strategies of most oil and gas producing enterprises of the district, a trend towards decarbonization has been identified.