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UNECE welcomes vote by Ukrainian parliament ratifying Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment

Ukraine made an important step towards sustainable development on 1 July 2015 with the ratification by the Ukrainian parliament (or Verkhovna Rada) of a law on the country’s accession to the UNECE Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment to the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context (Espoo Convention). As a next step, Ukraine is expected to deposit its instrument of accession with the United Nations Secretary-General and, 90 days later, Ukraine will become the twenty-seventh Party to the Protocol. 


Reacting to the event, UNECE Executive Secretary, Christian Friis Bach commented: “The systematic application of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) to government plans and programmes is acknowledged to be a key tool for integrating environment and health concerns into economic activities and for supporting the transition to green economy. It improves the cost-effectiveness of planning and programming, by avoiding costly mistakes and severe environmental effects. This is a major step towards building up public trust and confidence in decision-making.”


“Accession to the Protocol will help Ukraine ensure that sectoral and local development plans and programmes that are likely to have a significant impact on the environment will be subjected to environmental assessment procedures. Beyond the adoption of legislation, it is also critical to develop our institutional framework with well-informed and competent staff in the public and private sector and detailed instructions to apply SEA procedures. In this regard, I welcome UNECE support for awareness-raising and the organization of training events, pilot projects and the development of national SEA guidelines”, said Anna Vronskaya, Deputy Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine.
Note to editors

The Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context, adopted in Espoo, Finland, in 1991, is in force since 1997, and counts 45 Parties, including the European Union. The Convention has been successfully applied over a thousand times to date to assess and manage the likely environment impact of certain economic activities across boarders and is applied more and more often. This growth reflects the increase in the number of Parties, but also indicates that States find transboundary environmental assessment a valuable procedure for informing and consulting the authorities and the public of neighbouring countries.


In 2003, the Convention was supplemented by the Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment, which entered into force in 2010. The Protocol is seen as key tool for sustainable development and greening economies: it ensures that Parties integrate environmental, including health, considerations and public concerns into their plans and programmes and, to the extent possible, also into policies and legislation, at the earliest stages. Unlike the Convention, the Protocol applies to government plans and programmes irrespective of whether they are likely to have an impact on the territory of another State. To date, the Protocol has 26 Parties, including the European Union.


UNECE provided the setting for the negotiation of the Convention and its Protocol and now provides the secretariat for the two treaties.


The Greening Economies in the Eastern Neighbourhood (EaP GREEN) programme is a large regional programme implemented in 2013-2016 by the UNECE, OECD, UNEP and UNIDO to assist the six European Union Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine — in their transition to green economy. The programme is financed by the European Commission, the four implementing organizations and other donors.

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