Over the last years the views of global community on the problems of interaction of natural and industrial environment have undergone some essential changes. If even a decade ago these problems in many respects were viewed as technological, related to the design and development of monitoring systems and certain clean industrial technologies, today the socio-economic and political basis of the environmental management problems is becoming obvious.

Some steps of transition to Sustainable Development are shown on this slide.

Today it is necessary to evaluate and provide economically justified recommendations for the regional administration to improve the quality of the natural environment on their territory. Such an approach is based on the elements of sustainable development concept.

Let us consider the implementation of a regional sustainable development concept in more detail. What information technologies and simulation models are required for this purpose?

This slide shows a general block diagram of the regional natural environment quality management.

Firstly, a specialized monitoring system must exist in the region. This system provides certain generalized (statistical) assessments of the regional conditions.

These statistical assessments of the specific regions' state can be divided into integrated blocks, which describe the region from various positions: 1 - social and economic, 2 - industrial and technological, 3 - public health and biological resources, and 4 - environmental and geophysical. 

Secondly, the availability of a simulation model of the regional development is assumed. This simulation model has two levels of granularity. They are forecast of regional development and strategies of regional management. 

In this slide you can see the place of the sustainable development strategy in the proposed hierarchy of the natural environment quality management problems.

Using appropriate scenarios of operating the simulation model, a feedback chain shown in this slide allows us to obtain numerical evaluations of possible options for sustainable development of the region. Naturally, there are specific values of parameters and constraints specific to the considered region.

It is possible to formalize the concept of evaluating the current state of a region, as well as the criteria of sustainable development.

The strategy of sustainable development can be proposed as a result of computing experiments with the created simulation model of the region. This allows us to find the extremal numerical values of the established criteria.

Implementation of the proposed approach will provide the interested state, international, and public organizations with unbiased data on the diagnosis of the state of a specific region and the forecast of its development for several years. 

It will allow us to identify a feasible strategy for the regional development management with the necessary information support of the administrative decision making.

This slide shows more detailed control scheme of the regional natural environment quality management using various computer systems for the decision making support. It is possible to see the interdependences between problems of traditional monitoring of the natural environment and assessment of the damage (cost) of the natural environment elements with the procedures of decision-making support for the environmental management.

In the center of this slide we can see that the quality of the natural environment (left green rectangle) is impacted by various anthropogenic factors (industry, transportation, agriculture) and it is worsened (right yellow rectangle).

Depending on the spatial and temporal scale of the environmental impact, the mechanisms to improve the natural environmental conditions can vary significantly. These mechanisms are understood as organizational, technical and financial measures, which are directed towards improving and restoring of the natural environment. 

According to this, there are various types of computer decision support systems (DSS). So, for emergency situations of time of making a decision should not exceed several hours, which should be taken into account by specialized DSS. Depending on the duration of exposure to pollutants, different DSS’s are required - real time (several days), tactical (up to year) and strategic (several years). 

This slide shows a generalized structure of integrating information technologies for decision making support into the environmental quality management in a region or a large industrial city. Many elements of such information technologies shown in this slide are designed and implemented under my managerial and scientific leadership.

Information technologies shown in this slide include four main parts: 1- various databases; 2 - models of various objects and processes; 3 – Artificial Intelligence software, and 4 – regional electronic maps. 

The results of different environmental assessments, including specialized electronic maps, are used for the decision making. These decisions are related to improving the environmental situation in the region.

Information technologies create options for such decisions: real-time decisions; tactical planning; and strategic planning.

Environmental monitoring systems collect the information on the state of the environment. Information on the current state of the natural environment flows through the feedback chains into the input of corresponding models. It allows us to evaluate the efficiency of taken measures to improve the natural environment and to correct these measures.