The Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Andriy Parubiy signed the Law of Ukraine “On Strategic Environmental Assessment”.
Under the bill No.6106, the strategic environmental assessment (SEA) law was adopted by the Parliament on March 20, 2018. The law is one of the key requirements of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and a number of other international agreements.
The concept of sustainable development, which seeks to integrate economic, social and environmental components of development, becomes of increasing importance in international, national and regional policies at the present stage of society development. The emergence of this concept is related to the need to solve environmental problems and to take into account environmental issues in the planning and decision-making processes on socio-economic development at national, regional and local level.
Strategic environmental assessment of strategies, plans and programs provides an opportunity to focus on a comprehensive analysis of potential impacts of planned environmental activities and use the findings of this analysis to prevent or mitigate environmental impacts in the strategic planning process. Strategic Environmental Assessment is a new tool for implementing environmental policies based on a simple principle: it is easier to prevent negative environmental consequences of activities at the planning stage than to identify and correct them at the stage of implementing a strategic initiative.
The objective of SEA is to ensure a high level of environmental protection and to enhance incorporation of environmental factors into the preparation of plans and programs to ensure sustainable development.
The adoption of the bill is a progressive step, since the impact on the environment in Ukraine has not been taken into account sufficiently.
Without SEA, the environmental impact assessment system will be inadequate as they operate together: SEA - at the strategic level, at the stage of developing strategies, programs and plans of other government planning documents, and EIA (environmental impact assessment) is carried out in relation to a well-defined program that may have an impact on the environment.
SEA precedes EIA in specific projects and influences the choice of future activities that will fall under EIA.
Strategic environmental assessment – a procedure of identifying, describing and evaluating effects of implementation of a public planning document on the environment, including human health, reasonable alternatives and developing measures to prevent, reduce and offset possible adverse effects, which includes the scoping of strategic environmental assessment, the preparation of the strategic environmental assessment report, the carrying out of public consultations and consultations (where necessary – transboundary consultations), the taking into account of the strategic environmental assessment report and the results of public consultations and consultations in the public planning document, the provision of information on the adoption of the public planning document.
A strategic environmental assessment shall be carried out for draft public planning documents in the field of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, energy, industry, transport, waste management, water use, environmental protection, telecommunications, tourism, urban planning (except for a spatial zoning plan) and land management (schemes) and implementation of which set the framework for types of activity (or which contain types of activity and projects) that under legislation require an environmental impact assessment, as well as for draft public planning documents which require an assessment in view of the likely effects on sites or objects of the nature-reserve fund or ecological network.
Refusal to hold public hearings or discussions may become a ground for going to court.