Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and Natural Resources 2020 number 2

This article discusses the tasks and features of the organization of natural parks within the boundaries of the Baikal Natu ral Territory, the phenomenon of which is reflected in Russia’s only federal law of a natural site, Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site, and the main purpose of which implies not only natural environment conservation but also a further development of the infrastructure ensuring visits to natural sites. It is found that the category of protected natural areas of a regional significance, “nature parks”, meets best the aforementioned objectives. An overview of international experience of the establishment of regional nature parks is presented. A classification of nature parks has been carried out, which subdivides them into three conditional groups according to the distance from large settlements, the location relative to the other protected areas, the type of visitors, the quality and level of visited natural, cultural and historical sites as well as the state of the environ ment. The situation with the dragging out the establishment of new nature parks within the Baikal Natural Territory is discussed, in spite of the numerous initiatives and the previously prepared ecological-geographical substantiations for them. Only one nature park, Ivano-Arakhleisky, has been established within the boundaries of the Baikal Natural Territory, and a further two parks, Shumak and Arey, are located in the vicinity of the boundaries of this territory. It is concluded that, in view of high anthropo genic pressures on the coast of Lake Baikal, they will provide access to the other natural territories by establishing the necessary infrastructure thus “drawing” to them the excessively great interest in the lake coast. This paper presents a list of 25 nature parks within the Baikal Natural Territory. Three nature parks in Irkutsk oblast: Nature Park of the City of Angarsk (the Angarsky and Usol’sky administrative districts), Vityaz’ (Shelekhovsky district) and Okunaisky (Swan Lakes) (Kazachinsko-Lensky dis trict) located in the ecological zone of atmospheric influence of the Baikal Natural Territory, are used as an example to show their place in the suggested classification and the characteristic of the organization of future protected areas.