The Ministry of Environment opens access to the results of environmental impact assessment
The Ministry of Ecology will open access to all documents in the Register of Environmental Impact Assessment Conclusions, which has been closed since the beginning of the full-scale war. First Deputy Minister Oleksandr Krasnolutskyi informed the public initiative “Holka” about the following:
“The minister read the article about Obolon Island and that the NGO had questions about access to the environmental impact assessment documents when writing the article. He instructed the relevant deputy to prepare proposals for amending existing regulations to expand public access to information from the Register of Environmental Impact Assessment Reports. Currently, a new register of environmental impact assessments on the Ecosystem has been launched since 2023, which identifies the user and then provides full access to all materials. At the same time, old documents are not recorded. The Ministry is working on fulfilling the order. Until the issue is resolved, the Ministry of Environment has provided and will continue to provide information from the EIA register, which was in effect until 12/31/2023, upon request free of charge.”
The reports on the environmental impact assessment allow citizens to see what impact an activity or construction may have on the environment, as well as to identify violations and corruption schemes in the course of this assessment and future activities.
Heorhii Mohylnyi, an analyst at the Holka civic initiative, says that while preparing the story about Obolon Island, it was difficult to obtain documents from the authorities, even though they should be publicly available:
“We turned to the body responsible for the environmental impact assessment here, the Department of Environmental Protection and Climate Change Adaptation of the Kyiv City State Administration. We were billed UAH 2,500 for scanning the documents and advised to apply to the Ministry of the Environment for permission. Copies of the documents are stored electronically in the Unified Register of Environmental Impact Assessment and should be publicly available online, but this access was restricted after the full-scale invasion. We are talking about 6,000 cases related to environmental impact assessment that should be publicly available. I hope that the situation will really change and the register will be opened.”
As a reminder, the Holka civic initiative wrote about access to documents in the Register of Environmental Impact Assessment Reports, which has been closed since the beginning of the full-scale war, on Dzerkalo Tyzhnia and Detector Media. After the publication, MPs Yaroslav Yurchyshyn (Holos) and Oleksandr Bakumov (Servant of the People) asked the Ministry of Environment to open access to the documents.
