Valuable geoheritage resources: Potential versus exploitation

Geoheritage is an important geological resource, which can provide with various socio-economical benefits. Although much attention has been paid to its potential use, the actual patterns of this resource exploitation are yet to be fully understood. Mountainous Adygeya, a geologically-rich area of the Western Caucasus, is used for testing semi-quantitative, scoring-based approaches for documenting these patterns. It is established that the exploitation of the rich geoheritage resources of the study area remains limited, although the localities with the higher value tend to experience stronger exploitation. It appears that the geoheritage resources can be strongly heterogeneous in regard to their value and exploitation intensity. Presently, the anthropogenic pressure from this exploitation is chiefly low or moderate, but it may accelerate in the future. Development of special policy is necessary to make the geoheritage resource exploitation sustainable, and objectives, instruments, and functions of this policy are proposed.