Institute of Geography Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia

About the Institute

The Institute was founded in Petrograd in 1918 as the Department of Industrial and Geographical Studies of Russia within the Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces of Russia (CNPF) at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS);  it became Geographical Department of CNPF in 1926, and Geomorphological Institute of the Academy of Sciences in 1930. It moved to Moscow in 1934 and was reorganized into the Institute of Physical Geography (since 1936 – Institute of Geography) of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The Institute has its present name since 1992.The Institute performs fundamental, field, and experimental research on the physical, economic, and social geography, it studies the structure, evolution, and contemporary dynamics and man-induced transformation of the landscape geosphere and its subsystems, the processes of interaction between dryland, ocean, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere and their monitoring, the territorial organization of the economy and settlement patterns of Russia and their forecasting while taking into consideration environmental conditions and resources management, provision of necessary life conditions for the population and biological diversity. The attention is also paid for the prediction of natural hazards. The processes of changes in the territorial structure of the global and European socio-economic, geopolitical and cultural space are also studied as well as the place of Russia within these processes.