Experts believe that the environmental situation in the country is deteriorating due to the lack of a normal inspection.
In Ukraine, it is necessary to immediately launch the work of the State Environmental Inspectorate, which is currently not working at full strength due to the non-appointment of the official leadership. The head of the All-Ukrainian Ecological League Tatyana Timochko said this at a press conference in UNIAN.
“The situation with the State Environmental Inspectorate is outrageous. The competition ended a month and a half ago, there is a winner, but the appointment did not take place. A quality structure for state supervision and control in the field of environmental protection should work in the country, ”she said. According to her, the functions of politics, control and economic activities in the field of environmental protection should be divided, and the State Environmental Inspectorate should become an independent and transparent body. “The All-Ukrainian Ecological League and public organizations have prepared a draft reform of the environmental sector, which involves the separation of the functions of environmental policy, state control, supervision and economic activity. Today, functions are combined in one ministry, this is fraught with corruption, ”said Tymochko. As the chairman of the public council at the State Environmental Inspection Mikhail Zakharchenko emphasized, the absence of the head negatively affects the work of the department. “The inspection has been without guidance for a long time, more than four months. Accordingly, this cannot but affect the quality of work of the body itself, ”he said. At the same time, the chairman of the National Ecological Council of Ukraine Oleksandr Chistyakov believes that the country’s ecology is rapidly deteriorating while officials “play in contests”. “Only in 2019, 2140 water bodies were poisoned – in them all or almost all died. “The State Environmental Inspectorate should monitor compliance with environmental laws, but now it’s not so simple,” he said. According to the expert, relying on data from the Ministry of Health, in 2019, 78% of premature deaths from strokes and heart attacks were caused by air pollution. At the same time, more than 57 thousand people die in Ukraine annually due to unsatisfactory ecology. As UNIAN reported earlier, on November 21, 2019, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine appointed the former People’s Deputy Yegor Firsov as Acting Chairman of the State Ecological Inspectorate. Later, the head of the department of ecology and natural resources of the Kiev city state administration, Andrey Malevanny, won the competition for the post of head of the department, but the official appointment did not take place. Earlier, Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection Aleksey Orzhel announced his intention to completely restart the work of the environmental inspection and to establish effective monitoring of emissions and effluents. Since the beginning of 2019, a moratorium on conducting state inspections has ceased to operate in Ukraine, which lasted from 2014.