Global Arctic Issues in Bilateral Cooperation for Environmental Management Protection

The issues of environmental protection in the Arctic region as an interdisciplinary area, including research in the field of climate change and water resources protection and imbalance and changes in the environment associated with anthropogenic impact, are included in the list of urgent problems of our time. The formation of a space of knowledge and the search for directions of scientific research in the Arctic in bilateral and multilateral interstate relations are aimed at creating interstate institutions of interaction in monitoring the state of the natural environment in the Eurasian Arctic. In this fragile natural ecosystem, there are two sea powers – Russia and China. The chapter presents four stages of modern bilateral Russian-Chinese relations, which are given as an example of the evolution of the normative theory of international relations: 1992–2001, the development of the foundations of modern relations; 2001–2014, the formation of interstate institutions and the achievement of agreements on strategic partnership; 2014–2019, the development of the main directions of social and economic development; and autumn 2019 to the present, the formation of bilateral relations in the context of the implementation of the conceptual model of sustainable development in line with balanced socioeconomic and environmental development. In this study, much attention is paid to multilateral international treaties and regional bilateral agreements between Russia and the People’s Republic of China in the field of creating a space for natural resource use and environmental protection, as well as a national strategy in the field of environmental protection regulation in the implementation of economic and other activities in the Russian Arctic. The chapter analyzes the main problems of legal regulation of environmental protection in the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation and examines the prospects for international cooperation between Russia and China in this area.