Legal instruments for stimulating environmentally friendly behavior: Successful practices in Russia and abroad

This paper presents an analysis of the most successful legal tools to stimulate environmentally friendly behavior of the population. The relevance of studying this issue follows from the disappointing data of the official statistics of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to which air pollution can lead to premature death of 6-9 million people by 2060. Using the example of Russia, the EU countries, the USA, India and Japan, the specifics of state influence are revealed with the aim of stimulating "green" behavior of the population, the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches to state regulation in the environmental sphere are considered. Foreign experience is analyzed through the prism of the potential for its further reception in Russia - for example, it is proposed to turn to the practice of India, expressed in the functioning of a separate environmental court; special attention is paid to foreign experience in providing benefits and state assistance in the acquisition of electric cars. Despite the fact that achieving socially desirable behavior is possible through the imposition of sanctions, measures to stimulate environmentally friendly behavior can also be an effective way of influencing public relations, as they can lead to the formation of environmental legal awareness, lead to conscious and responsible, socially active behavior in relation to the environment. In the process of preparing the paper, an extensive regulatory and scientific material was studied (including using the legal research services such as Consultant Plus, Garant and Westlaw Academics), and the research methodology was both special legal (rather-legal, technical) and general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, deduction, induction, etc.). © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).