Today is World Environment Day (WED). This is the International Day of the United Nations. The idea behind celebrating this day is that everyone on the planet should think at least for a moment about the environment and his/her place in global processes.
This is a special day for International charitable organization “Environment-People-Law”. We analyze and sum up everything we did during the year. In fact, we have an enormous amount of work at different levels: local, national (Ukrainian) and international. We are really grateful to all the people of good will who help us, who join in spreading our ideas, who do strive to solve environmental problems! Together we are able to overcome all challenges!
Today we have a great opportunity to briefly report on what we have done during the year.
Our analysts have developed 6 policy papers.
Our experts continued to work on the development of:
– draft Law “On State Environmental Control” (registered in the Parliament);
– the draft Law “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine on Access to Environmental Information and Public Participation in the Decision-Making Process on Environmental Issues” (submitted to the Committee on Environmental Policy);
– the draft Law on State Monitoring.
We analyzed and submitted proposals to the following legislative initiatives:
– draft laws on amber extraction;
– a draft Law on Amendments to Some Laws on Introduction of a Prohibition on Continuous Felling of Fir-Beech Forests on the Mountain Slopes of the Carpathian Region;
- – the draft Law on burning dry vegetation;
– a number of draft laws on lobbying;
– the draft Law on the Emerald Network territories;
– the draft Law on Prevention, Reduction and Control of Industrial Pollution.Moreover, EPL participated in the development of the “Guidelines for the Development of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports in forestry” that were officially approved this year.
We participated in more than 100 environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures! This means we analyzed dozens of thousands of pages of various materials.
This year (January-June 2020) we provided 100 consultations to environmental activists, which is about 16 000 hours of work!
We are actively handling 12 strategic litigation cases across the country. That is why our experts have made 13 thousand kilometers of traveling to participate in court hearings and do field studies!
We played the key role in prevention of chalk mining on the territory of the planned expansion of Dvorichanskyi National Nature Park. Thanks to EPL’s intervention, forest logging plans in Boyarka forest research station and plans for peat extraction in “Koza-Berezyna” deposit will go through additional environmental impact assessment (EIA), negative EIA conclusions were issued regarding projects of forest logging in Luhyn forestry and construction of a hydro power plant on the Stryy River. EIA conclusions prohibit peat extraction in forest areas in the territory of “Velyke bahno” and “Velyke boloto” deposits…
Anti-corruption investigations were conducted regarding the state enterprise “Biological Resources of Ukraine” that in particular relate to EIA conclusion development, misuse of budget funds of the Department of Environmental Protection of Kyiv regional administration and findings of the investigation were submitted to law-enforcement bodies.
We should definitely mention our #Return_the Ministry of Environment campaign. Last year, the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Environment were merged leading to adverse consequences for the environment. Fortunately, the government adopted the decision to split the clumsy “monster” into two ministries.
To be continued!
