Oil-Spill Damage Valuation for Regional Sustainability Transitions in the Russian North: A Modular Institutional Framework

Environmental damage assessment has become an important institutional component of regional sustainability transitions, especially in resource-dependent northern territories where industrial risks, fragile ecosystems, sparse monitoring networks, and limited institutional capacity intersect. Existing oil-spill valuation approaches provide well-developed legal, economic, and ecosystem-service tools; however, their use as decision-support instruments for compensation governance, prevention investment, monitoring design, and regional resilience policy remains insufficiently operationalized. This article addresses this gap by developing a modular institutional framework for selecting and combining established environmental damage valuation methods under the ecological, legal, data-related, and socio-cultural constraints of the Russian North. The study applies a transparent narrative methodological review and framework-building design based on international and Russian literature, official regulatory sources, natural-resource damage assessment practice, ecosystem-service valuation studies, and publicly available evidence on the 2020 Norilsk diesel fuel spill. The analysis organizes six established valuation approaches into three complementary modules: direct harm, indirect and opportunity-related losses, and non-market ecosystem-service losses. The Norilsk case is used as an illustrative plausibility check rather than a full empirical recalculation. It shows that legally recognized compensation can provide a liability signal, but indirect losses and ecosystem-service components require separate evidence, sensitivity analysis, and double-counting control. The contribution of the article is to adapt established valuation methods into a transparent decision-support protocol that links environmental liability, compensation governance, prevention, monitoring, institutional resilience and regional sustainability transitions in Arctic and sub-Arctic resource regions.