**Preface to "Green Economy and Sustainable Development"**

Today sustainable development is associated with increasing the responsibility of business, governments and the entire society around the world for achieving a balance between current and future needs for subsoils, energy, traditional and new materials, and transport. Such responsibility equalizes environmental and social problems (poverty and malnutrition, inequalities in access to wealth and income distribution), which often have common roots. This, in turn, highlights the importance of interdisciplinary and multilateral research of sustainable development issues, the results of which can answer the questions about green economy perspectives.

The green economy—the newest way to obtain and use resources—is a product of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and it concentrates many of the achievements of Industry 4.0. The related structural shifts in the economy are caused by the emergence of new industries of waste recycling, zero-emission energy production, absorption of greenhouse gases emissions, green urbanism, and post-mining. These shifts should be summed up in a parallel increase in productivity and labor safety, improved access to drinking water, food, energy, as well as in joining the efforts of national states and businesses in the fight against climate change, in replacing minerals with renewable resources.

> **Sergey Zhironkin, Michal Cehlar** *Editors*
