Territories of the «northern delivery»: new approaches to categorization

Ensuring the sustainability of settlements in the Far North regions is achievable only through a comprehensive set of measures for the procurement and delivery of essential goods (primarily food and fuel) from other areas, known as the «Northern Delivery» The current supply system is marked by inefficiencies that create high risks of delivery disruptions. Enhancing this system requires developing and implementing optimal measures to influence the economic relationships within the «Northern Delivery» framework, alongside determining effective legal regulatory methods. A critical step in this process is the establishment of precise and strictly defined territorial boundaries for implementing these measures. At present, there is no legal formalization of spatial limits for the array of managerial, logistic, and socio-economic processes aimed at ensuring uninterrupted deliveries of goods for the «Northern Delivery» underscoring the importance of this research. The aim of this study is to define the criteria and their quantitative parameters to categorize the regions of the Far North and equivalent areas with limited cargo delivery periods. By synthesizing the work of both domestic and international scholars on the zoning of northern territories and assessing their transport accessibility, as well as utilizing cartographic research methods and focus groups, an algorithm for categorizing the settlements of the Far North regions has been developed. The identified selection criteria include transport accessibility, the presence of stable supply logistics chains, the duration of heating period, and the level of provision with basic food products. This categorization resulted in identifying of three groups of territories based on the supply organization mechanism: critical, supporting, and basic supply. The proposed categorization can be used to determine the spatial limits for legal regulation of the «Northern Delivery» and to develop a specific set of measures to ensure the uninterrupted delivery of essential goods.