The laboratory studies a wide range of problems within the framework of geography of the modern world economy and world development: various aspects of industrial geography and geography of agriculture, diffusion of information technologies, spatial pattern of FDI and transnational business, international migration and urbanization, problems of global integration and globalization as a historical phenomenon,  regional development in foreign countries, etc

Mountain regions as an area of extremal endo- and exogenesis.
Exogenous (including anthropogenous) morpholithogenesis under different conditions.
Development of methods of geomodeling and mapping using new GIS-technologies

Reaction of snow cover and vegetation to climate change, numerical modeling of interaction between landscapes and the atmosphere (A.B.Shmakin, A.N.Krenke, V.V.Popova, D.V.Turkov, L.M.Kitaev);

Processes of desertification (A.N.Zolotokrylin, V.V.Vinogradova, T.B.Titkova, E.A.Cherenkova);

Regional climate change in Russia and extreme climatic events now and during the last millennium (V.V.Popova, M.M.Chernavskaya, A.N.Krenke, A.B.Shmakin);

1) geopolitical culture and imaginations, their relations with territorial identities, the location of Russia and other countries in the world space of flows and foreign policy; 

2) theory of border studies, cross-border interactions and cooperation, neighbourhood policy in the post-Soviet space; 

3) Non-controlled territories and non-recognized states in the world and in the former USSR: geographical factors of their evolution and problems of internal and external legitimacy;