Ensuring Environmental Safety: The Global Experience and Ukrainian Perspectives

Abstract

This article presents the environmental component as one of the extremely important components of national security, which is a state of natural objects protection, as well as the protection of human life and health from environmental threats, where all components of the natural environment are optimal for the normal functioning and development of human civilization. One of the important tasks of ensuring environmental safety is to guarantee a population's livelihood in a technogenically safe and ecologically clean world. This is why concern about the state of the environment grows every year, and the need to integrate environmental policy with security measures remains a priority for world leaders. In the leading states of the world, such as the USA, Germany, Great Britain and France, environmental safety is considered as one of the main areas of environmental policy implementation. In particular,a "Green Deal" is currently being implemented in the European Union which will help the EU become the world's first climate-neutral continent by 2050. It is important that the Ukrainian state faces not the simple, but the obvious and important task of ensuring and restoring its environmental security. In order to transform environmental safety to high standards and become an example of a country that can rebuild its environmental sector in a post-war period, Ukraine needs to develop the following priority directions in the environmental sector: reforming state management in the field of environmental protection, compliance with climate policy, effective waste management, reasonable use of natural resources, and conservation of natural ecosystems and biodiversity. With the introduction of such reforms as part of a comprehensive climate policy, including ecological safety, reform of the regulation of industrial pollution, effective waste management, the rational use of natural resources, ecological management so as to preserve the landscape and biological diversity, effective state management in the field of environmental protection, environmental control and establishing legal responsibility thereof, and comprehensive environmental monitoring, Ukraine will be able to transform its environmental safety to high standards and become an example of a country that was able to rebuild its environmental sector in a post-war period.