Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
buildings and facilities”. This instruction laid down the foundations of the
OVOS
3
procedure.
At that time the Soviet government established the inter-ministerial scientific
and technical Council for complex problems of environmental protection and ra-
tional use of natural resources (MNTS)
4
. The main task of this council was to
study the contemporary instruments for preventing environmental problems and to
develop fundamentals for the environmental assessment system in the USSR. As a
result, the system of the State Environmental Expertise was developed, which was
fit into the existing vertical planning system.
At the beginning of 1988 the government adopted a Decree “On the radical re-
form of nature protection”. This decree provided for the creation of the State
committee for nature protection (later on it was reorganised into the Ministry of
Environment). The committee affiliated special Departments for the state envi-
ronmental expertise that functioned in all regions and conducted SEEs of projects,
plans, programmes, new materials and technologies.
Soviet-type environmental expertise systems, which were either retained or re-
formed, are operated in most post-Soviet countries - Ukraine, Russia, Belarus,
Moldova, Kazakhstan etc. (Dalal-Clayton and Sadler 2005).
After Ukraine gained independence, a number of legal acts and regulations
providing for environmental assessment had been adopted, in particular the Laws
of Ukraine “On environmental protection” (1991), “On environmental expertise”
(1995). The latter included many progressive provisions for the environmental as-
sessment of projects, which were adopted from the European legislation of that
time. The SEE procedure became more flexible and transparent; with the estab-
lishment of the procedure for public environmental expertise.
At the same time the current system of environmental assessment is not fully
developed, as it lacks a process for integrating environmental concerns into strate-
gic decision-making, i.e. into development policies, plans and programmers.
13.3.3 Limitations of Ukrainian Environmental Assessment at
Strategic Level
As discussed in the previous subsection, the Ukrainian environmental assessment
system has the form of environmental expertise (EE) which is also applied in
many other post-Soviet countries.
Ukrainian legislation provides for various types of environmental expertise:
•
state environmental expertise (SEE),
•
public environmental expertise (PEE), and
3
OVOS is the anglicised Russian acronym for the procedure similar to EIA called 'as-
sessment of impacts on the environment' (
Otsenka Vozdejstviya na Okruzhayushchuyu
Sredu
).
4
Cherp and Lee (1997) provided a shorter translation of the Council's title - Interminis-
terial Council on Environmental Science and Technology (p. 180).
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