Environmental Pressures and Monitoring Gaps in Northwestern Russia: A Scoping Review of Industrial Pollution, Baltic Sea Risks and Geoinformatics-Based Monitoring Options (2014–2025)

This scoping review examines environmental pressure clusters and monitoring gaps in the Northwestern Federal District of the Russian Federation during 2014–2025. It asks how persistent industrial and urban pressures can be assessed when post-2022 restrictions on data exchange have weakened transboundary verification. The review follows Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping-review framework, Levac et al.‘s methodological refinement and PRISMA-ScR reporting principles. It synthesises peer-reviewed studies, intergovernmental assessments, institutional reports, corporate disclosures and open geospatial documentation, organised into seven pressure clusters: atmospheric pollution; water resources and aquatic contamination; soil and sediment contamination; municipal, industrial and hazardous waste; biodiversity, eutrophication and non-indigenous species; nuclear, chemical and oil-spill risks; and the post-2022 monitoring gap. The strongest evidence concerns reduced SO₂ emissions from Kola Peninsula smelting after 2020, persistent Baltic Sea eutrophication and hazardous-substance pressures, trace-metal contamination in Kola waters and Neva Estuary biomonitoring results. Evidence remains more uneven for waste governance, urban exposure gradients and ecosystem recovery trajectories. The review finds that monitoring capacity has itself become an environmental-governance issue: weakened cooperation reduces verification precisely where long-lived industrial legacies and climate-amplified risks require long time series. The article proposes a hybrid monitoring approach combining field sampling, HELCOM indicators, source-critical Russian and corporate data, Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI atmospheric screening from 2018 onward, Sentinel-1/2 and Landsat-type land-cover indicators, Google Earth Engine workflows and explicit uncertainty grading. Northwestern Russia is therefore treated as a test case for environmental assessment under fragmented data conditions.