LEGISLATIVE AND NORMATIVE METHODS OF ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT IN UKRAINE

Abstract

Sustainable development is quite popular scientific concept in a recent time, which formed the basis of the Ukrainian regional development strategic planning and regulation of urban development activities. However, the meth-odological basis for assessing the sustainability of the territorial development is still not developed and formalized enough. Methods for assessing the sustainability of territorial systems development in the economic, environmental and social spheres are still uncertain.Therefore, selected purpose of the study is an analysis of the existing methods of environmental assessment of the territorial development set forth in the legislative and regulatory documents, with further determination of the their suitability for conducting an assessment of the territorial development based on the sustainable development concept, which will form the scientific novelty of this study. To achieve this goal, the legislative and regulatory framework analysis was carried out in the field of territorial development, the main regulatory documents were identified. Subsequently, the definition of ecological assessment and its purpose for each of these basic documents was analyzed, environmental assessment methods and their application suitability for the environmental assessment of the territorial development based of the sustainable development concept were considered. It is concluded, that the environmental assessment methods proposed in these documents have numerous signifi-cant shortcomings when used for ecological assessment of the territorial development sustainability. There is no any formalized methodology for determining the sustainability of the relevant systems development in considered legisla-tive and regulatory documents. There is also an intersection of proposed environmental assessment methods with social and economic assessments. The optimality justifies of the adopted project decisions set issuing exclusively from the environmental and sanitary legislation requirements is incorrect in terms of sustainable development. The conclusion based on the obtained results was made about the need to improve the environmental assessment methods in their abil-ity of sustainable development concept implementation. The assessment of the current territorial state in the economic, social and environmental spheres must be carried out separately from each other while regional development strategies forms on the basis of sustainable development. It will pro-vide further assess of each sphere development balance and form a strategy direction for additional needed measures.Carrying environmental assessment, the strategy analysis for compliance with legislative and regulatory con-straints is insufficient in terms of the sustainable development concept. The assessment of environmental impacts should be carried out both for negative aspects and for positive, where the last are not normalized. Conclusions based on the negative environmental impacts absence are insufficient to consider strategies for developing such territories, as national parks or nature reserves. Therefore, the existing indicators system of environmental pollution levels by human activity as a basis for ecological assessment needs to be finalized, since it does not allow measuring the positive effects of some nature-recovery projects on the environment. Finally, it is necessary to formalize in legislative and regulatory documents the methods for the integrated sustainabil-ity assessment as a basis for consideration of alternative concepts for the territorial development. Formation and implementa-tion of appropriate methods can be selected as a direction for further research by the author on the chosen topic.