As climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, the legal and economic issues of global environmental security deserve high praise. In the area of industrial competitiveness, where the negative effects of global climate change include floods and droughts, forest fires, and rising sea levels, climate change is highly problematic. Climate impacts affect public and private agricultural infrastructure (including the coastal zone), resulting in lost productivity and increased costs for agriculture. The article applies climate change on a global scale in the form of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to determine how the mixtures and emissions of any one entity affect other areas (e.g., individual, community, company or country emissions). Exploring the theoretical and practical premises of climate change as a complex phenomenon, the novelty of this article is that it examines the current framework of the environmental-legal concept, not just the political implications of the legal framework. The research aim of the article lies in two dimensions: the European Union's current climate change policy framework (the climate and energy package, a set of climate change strategies and related policies targeting EU candidate countries); recent environmental operations in Ukraine as an EU candidate country under extraordinary conditions. This article examines recent changes in climate legislation and climate policy in EU member and candidate countries, as well as other highly developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and China. Focusing on the impact of the EU Climate and Energy Package (2020 and 2030), this article examines the main implications of EU climate legislation regulating the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and promoting the role of renewable energy in global energy consumption and energy efficiency in general. As a result of this study, this analysis offers multifaceted conclusions based on the interaction of a number of current administrative acts on climate change and environmental policy on a global scale.
The aim of this article is to analyse the current state of legal regulation of public participation in the strategic environmental assessment (hereinafter – SEA) procedure, to study the mechanism for exercising this right and to identify its possible shortcomings. The article concludes that there are some problems that do not properly exercise the public’s right to participate in SEA. They are the follows: 1) the procedure of public discussion during the SEA needs to be improved in terms of informing the public; 2) the mechanism of guaranteeing and protecting the right to participate in SEA is imperfect and does not provide adequate protection in the event of a violation of this right. On author’s opinion the list of mandatory measures, defined in the SEA legislation of Ukraine, does not fully ensure the effective informing of the public and involving it in the discussion of state planning documents. The information that really aims to engage the general public should include not only print media but also a broad social media campaign, engaging journalists in radio and television coverage. However, there is a risk that detailed regulation at the legal level of ways of informing the public in this area would lead to unjustified costs of SEA customer’s budgets. Particular attentionin the article is paid to the study of ways of protecting the rights of the public in case of improper informing or neglect of public comments during the SEA. It is concluded that ways of protection of the investigated right may be the next: to challenge the decisions, actions or omissions of participants of the SEA process and to bring to justice for the violation of the requirements of the SEA legislation. However, The SEA Act makes no mention of such mechanisms. The Code of Administrative Offenses and the Criminal Code of Ukraine also do not contain the relevant types of offenses. The author considers this situation unacceptable and proposes to supplement the Code of Ukraine of Administrative Offenses with the relevant offenses in the field of SEA. The article concludes that mediation is an important mechanism for resolving conflicts that may arise in the conduct of SEA. This procedure may be applied at any stage of SEA. If it is obvious that conflict will not be avoided, mediation should be applied as soon as possible. At the same time, its terms should not be too long, so as not to paralyze the development of draft state planning document.
The right of citizens to participate in decision-making in environmental matters is provided by many international acts: the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the Aarhus Convention, the EU Directives (Directive 2001/42/EC, Directive 2003/35/EC, and Directive 2011. A group of rights aimed at the realization of this general right are also defined in national legislation, in particular, in the Law of Ukraine "On Environmental Protection". To comply with requirements of Annex XXX (Environment) of the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, there were adopted the laws of Ukraine "On environmental impact assessment" (hereinafter -the EIA Act) and "On strategic environmental assessment" (hereinafterthe SEA Act). It has led to the formation of new mechanisms of interaction between the public, business entities and authorities.However, in spite of certain achievements in ensuring the implementation of the right to participate in decision-making in environmental matters, there are a number of problems in its application in practice. They are the next: the different understanding of the concept of "public" both within national legislation and in comparison with international law; the imperfect mechanism of preventing the ignorance of the public's position. There is no legal regulation of the ways of pre-trial settlement of the dispute, in particular, through mediation. The organization and conduction of public discussion of plans, development strategies and specific planned activities requires an improvement.The article analyzes the peculiarities of realization of the right to participate in decision-making in environmental matters, reveals the shortcomings of the current legislation, suggests ways to eliminate them.
The article analyzes the impact of military operations on the state of ecosystems and individual natural resources in Ukraine. Based on the analysis of Ukrainian and foreign sources, it was made a conclusion about the catastrophic damage to the environment caused by the military aggression of the Russian Federation. In particular, the environmental damage as of September 2022 is estimated at almost 1 trillion hryvnias and continues to grow daily. Taking into account the fact that the impact on the environment during armed conflicts almost always has a transboundary nature, author analyzed the provisions of international acts that regulate this problem. These are the Stockholm Declaration (1972); the World Charter of Nature; the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992); the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques; Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts; Convention on the prohibition of the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons and on their destruction. It was established that all the mentioned documents call on the international community to take measures for preventing or minimizing the destructive impact on the environment during military operations. The author paid particular attention to Ukrainian legislation. The Instruction on the Procedure for Implementing the Norms of International Humanitarian Law in the Armed Forces of Ukraine requires following the provisions of international humanitarian law, including, in the context of environmental protection. In the Basic Principles (Strategy) of the State Environmental Policy of Ukraine for the Period Until 2030, it is noted that it is absolutely necessary to solve the issue of access to the objects of the military-defense industrial complex in order to carry out appropriate supervision and control over compliance with environmental legislation at these objects. A separate block of normative acts is devoted to the legal regulation of the procedure and methods of determining damage and losses caused to the environment of Ukraine as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation. Despite the fact that the war continues, the development of normative acts aimed at regulating the reconstruction of destroyed or damaged territories and objects is already being observed. The author analyzed some of them, identified shortcomings and proposed ways to eliminate them.
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