The first year of environmental impact assessment (EIA) in Ukraine
On December 18, the year after the environmental impact assessment (EIA) in Ukraine came into force. The procedure of environmental impact assessment is aimed for identification the level, intensity and nature of hazardous impact on human health and environmental. Environmental impact assessment is running through the Unified Register, an open platform for collecting, systematizing and storing data and documents in the process of environmental impact assessment: the notification on planned activity, propositions and comments from the public, advertisement on the start of public hearings and discussions, report and conclusion on environmental impact assessment.
The key moment of environmental impact assessment is the public participation in the process of EIA. At public hearings, all interested persons can ask questions, express their opinions or provide propositions/comments regarding the planned activity of the business entity.
Last year in Ukraine were started 1795 procedures of environmental impact assessment, 480 of them – have finished (business entities received the conclusions or the refusal). The most procedures were submitted from Lviv (190 procedures), Ivano-Frankivsk (145 procedures) and Poltava (135 procedures) regions. But the smallest number of EIA procedures was provided in Kyiv (25 procedures), Kirovohrad (27 procedures) and Luhansk (30 procedures) regions.
Over the year 406 public hearings were carried out, 162 hearings of which were held without residents. Totally, 5858 residents were participated in public hearings. Most of comments and propositions (after the publication of the notification of planned activity) were received from the residents of Dnipropetrovsk, Zakarpattia and Zhytomyr regions. The residents from Ternopil, Rivne and Kharkiv regions were less active. By the number of submitted propositions and comments of the reports on EIA, the leaders are Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv regions.
As a result, despite the high number of submitted procedures of EIA (this is more than expected during the first year of the law “On Environmental Impact Assessment”), there has been observed the low activity of residents. Only 20% of submitted procedures of environmental impact assessment received comments and propositions from the public. Besides the number of hearings held without residents.