There are quite a few environmental issues in Russia.
Many of them have been attributed to policies during the Soviet Union, when officials felt that pollution control was unnecessary to economic development and industrialization. As a result of this, 40% of Russia’s territory began demonstrating symptoms of ecological stress by the 1990’s, largely due to deforestation, energy irresponsibility, pollution, and nuclear waste. Conditions are only continuing to get worse. One of the main environmental issues in Russia is energy. Inefficient energy usage and the use of fossil fuels is a big problem for the country.
Upgrading energy equipment could save up to $1 billion of fuel each year. 68% of Russia’s energy is produced by polluting fossil fuels, and it is a major producer of those fuels. Another environmental issue in Russia is water pollution, 50% of all water in Russia is now polluted. Polluted water can cause health issues for Russia’s citizens, but they are the ones causing it. More pollution is being created by trying to fix the issue, water treatment facilities are causing heavy pollution and adding to the problem of pollution as a whole. The actions taken in both these situations in relation to the Tragedy of the Commons, is the carelessness of the people in Russia. Many of them do not give thought to what they are doing on a daily basis when, really, they are affecting, not only themselves, but also a great number of people that share the space around them. The actions that they are taking is not paying attention to energy usage, which depletes resources and costs more money, and littering, which is polluting the water.
The self-interest in both cases is to make things easier for the individual. For the energy usage, people are using the resources that they have access to because they want to make things easier for themselves. The issue is that they don’t pay attention to how it will affect others. For the water pollution, the self-interest may be that it saves them time to litter, or that it saves them the energy of worrying about what to do with trash. In both of these examples, the people taking the action are the Russian citizens.
Also, for both, the location of the action is anywhere in Russia because people are doing these things everywhere just to make things easier on themselves. The resources being depleted in these situations are fossil fuels and water. The potential effects if these things continue is that people will run out of resources, which will make life extremely difficult. If the water pollution keeps occurring then it can affect people’s health and their everyday lives will become a lot different than they are now.