Environmental recovery of Ukraine: Assessing damages and forming solutions - part II

Introduction: Environmental damages in Ukraine

As Part 1 of the case study indicates, environmental pollution and damages that Ukraine has suffered are significantly high, which requires an urgent search for sustainable solutions for ecosystem restoration “here and now”.

Case study: Indicating possible environmental recovery projects available for the key local actors in Ukraine.

Project proposals are drafted for different types of local actors, as Ukraine’s civil society scene is only getting stronger and civil society representatives are as proactive as ever. Even pre-war, it was very common that local government representatives, NGOs, and civil society were taking more initiative in the territories’ development than the central government. This tendency only intensified after the beginning of the russian full-scale invasion.

As highlighted in the overview made by RTI Centre for Governance (2023), the main changes on behalf of Ukrainian society after 2022 are “large-scale mobilisation of civil society” that includes “extensive financial support of Ukraine’s Armed Forces through fundraising efforts by public figures, NGOs, volunteer groups, and the government”. The report concludes that “strong levels of trust; speedy, effective mobilisation of civil society; and increased levels of civic engagement point to democratic strengthening and capacity in Ukraine that is already playing an important role in the country’s reconstruction.” Therefore, we can confidently consider civil society actors as a moving force of change for Ukraine’s recovery, during the war and post-war.

As expressed in the multiple statements by Ukraine’s civil society organisations throughout 2022 (12 organisations that signed), 2023(a), 2023(b), and 2023 (42 organisations that signed), Ukraine’s environmental recovery and restoration initiatives must be in line with the world’s best practices for ecosystem recovery. Due to the volume of Ukraine’s ecosystems and environmental areas destroyed or under threat, ecosystem restoration could be the only “on the ground, here and now” way to slow down environmental degradation caused by war.

Ukraine also has great potential to become one of the few pioneers in the ecosystem restoration efforts and one of the leaders of the global initiative of the United Nations called “UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration”. Coherent with Ukraine’s need, the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration “is a rallying call for the protection and revival of ecosystems all around the world, for the benefit of people and nature; it aims to halt the degradation of ecosystems and restore them to achieve global goals”, stressing the need to reinforce environmental restoration efforts worldwide.  

Projects proposed for the 3 main civil society actors are selected and structured in accordance with the publications available on the subject of environmental restoration by FAO, SER & IUCN CEM., 2023; FAO & UNEP, 2021; UN Decade on Ecosystems Restoration, UNEP, & FAO, 2021.

Projects for the NGO representatives

NGO’s in Ukraine are allowed to have a wide scope of work, which is why the 3 project types identified cover a wider scope of the intervention and complexity.

Project 1. The awareness campaign on the environmental restoration of the chosen territory. This will first include preparation of the initial assessment of the territory: damage done to it at the moment of the project application (ecosystems degraded), species present on the territory and then choosing relevant environmental restoration techniques for the specific type of terrain and species present (which could be possible by consulting the UN Decade guide “The Standards of practice”). The information campaign could be a social media campaign, a physical advertising campaign, master classes and training for the local population, spreading the word in collaboration with other local stakeholders, local community groups and local government.

Project 2. Environmental restoration project, drafting its practical components, coordination and monitoring of the actors involved. The scope of this type of action will require substantive preparations on behalf of the NGO and their partners. As in the previous type of action, it requires initial assessment of the territory, damage caused and species present. For a technical project of that type, there’s a need to involve independent experts in the field for a profound initial assessment of the territory.

Therefore, NGOs will need a partner coalition to support them with the related expenses, through cooperation with other local actors (local government, businesses, donors, local community groups). Based on the initial assessment, the coalition will define the goals for the restoration activities, divide responsibilities, detect the main components of the work, set a timeline, and identify resources needed and funds required to carry out the project. It’s important to identify the benchmarks and indicators for the project’s success beforehand. 

When finishing a project proposal, it could be submitted for any funding call available, and such a united local actor’s action has a high chance of being selected and funded. NGOs should be the main coordinators, even being the holders of the funding received, ensuring the quality of the monitoring over the implementation, and making sure that sustainability, equity, local participation, co-management, democracy, and inclusivity criteria are not overlooked while performing the project.

Project 3. Driving legislative changes for the viability of environmental recovery initiatives. The legislation framework is a baseline for any action taken on the territory. Ukraine’s legislation on energy efficiency, renewable resources, and environmental protection requires efforts to 1) better divide the responsibilities between the state and its agencies, 2) clear up the cases of contradictory secondary legislation, and 3) ensure that Ukraine’s legislation is coherent with EU legislation. The procedures adopted by the EU have to be legally binding in Ukraine, such as the obligatory Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) procedure and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), collecting a Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) from the local communities while drafting any project on their territory. This will ensure that the recovery funds pledged will be used in a sustainable and ethical way, which local communities actively lobby for.

Local NGOs can lobby for their implementation in Ukraine, attend the policy-making meetings in their local governance representation, organise discussion tables with experts and local communities, and write petitions and legislation draft proposals to the local governance. In addition to that, if expertise and capacity allow, NGOs’ personnel can review current legislation and identify the gaps to further send remarks to the government. They can draft a project that will consist of the proposed baseline and framework of their future lobbying activities, and resources needed and can further be submitted as a request for financing those activities and hiring relevant personnel.

Project proposal for the local municipality representatives

Municipalities and their local authorities certainly have more power over getting all necessary regulatory approvals and getting work permits to perform more complex works; they also have local budgets on their hands. All that, added to the existing experience in governance and coordination, local influence and reputation, presence of the designated physical infrastructure, and permanent personnel, allows local authorities and their representatives to become an active force in the environmental recovery projects in the future.

Considering the new executive and planning capacities of the local authorities, as well as the challenges and limitations they have, municipalities can take over a few of the following types of environmental projects.

Project 1. Initiating a large-scale physical project restoration on its territory. It’s in the municipality’s interests to form a coalition with the local community, NGOs’ representatives, and local businesses’ representatives and co-write large-scale environmental recovery projects for their territory. Due to the scale of the destruction, the most efficient approach for the small and medium-sized cities is to consider the restoration of green zones and natural areas, which could be forests, peatlands, or any other type of previously vibrant natural territory.

The main focus should be on the improvement of the health of soils, to create the best conditions for healthy ecosystems, and the prevention of further harm to the territory. For the South of Ukraine and all the natural reserves affected, it could be done by reviving the natural protected territory and the formation of an eco-tourism camp to raise necessary funds for the territory’s full recovery. The project should also prioritise the creation of environmentally friendly infrastructure in the municipality. Depending on the focus of recovery drafted, when finished, this project can be submitted to the international donors’ call for funding, private businesses’ funding as a part of a social responsibility program, or submitted to the governmental fundraising platform.

Project type aside, the main and real challenge that municipalities will have to address from their side will be to initiate the demining of the territory. This has to be done in parallel with forming a project proposal, and this will be the main role of the municipality at this point. Another important aspect they should be charged with will be creating and adapting new nature-protecting legislation to ensure that the project proposal formed by the coalition will be able to last long-term without a threat of disruption and will be able to scale up when necessary.

Project 2. Creating new legislation, adopting new environmental policies, and developing new local plans and strategies. Municipalities have to work on the legislation and local policies which will prioritise environmental recovery. All types of environmental protection should be granted to the local natural areas that remained unaffected by the war, while affected areas’ recovery projects should be assisted in getting necessary permits and receive cooperation from the local government. 

Municipalities should hold community meetings to define new goals and objectives for local governance and local planning. Participative governance techniques have to be adopted even in the smallest municipalities, giving a place at the table for any and every citizen who is willing to participate in the governance process. New development strategies have to be adapted, and they should follow the axis of sustainable territorial development, not to allow any return to the old ways of natural resource depletion and deforestation. Municipalities have to take a firm stand towards the direction that their territories should take, and this has to be reflected in every regulatory measure they adopt     . 

They also need to ensure that the spending of the funds related to recovery projects will be transparent and to address communities’ fears regarding corruption schemes. All tenders for the local procurement have to be published on the “Prozorro” tender platform, and only environmentally sustainable providers and suppliers should be chosen by the tender winner. New incentives should be created to support restoration practices over ones causing the degradation. All in all, municipalities should ensure favourable conditions for the environmental recovery projects and make sure that their procedures and legislation will encourage future investors, reassuring them of the safety of their investment in a new sustainable local economy. 

Project 3. Implementation of the extensive study of the affected territories and their monitoring. Though other actors can and should do relevant environmental assessment studies, in some cases, only municipalities have resources and personnel with relevant experience in the field. Municipalities should attempt to form a working team to conduct detailed research on their local territories affected, which will ensure the longevity of the future recovery project. Very often in Ukraine’s history, local soils have been abused either by agricultural overproduction or by atypical for the territory species’ plantation, which resulted in the soil’s fertility degradation. In the Carpathian Mountains, the issue is illegal deforestation. 

There are looming concerns over the environmental consequences of the explosions of the mines, projectiles and general warfare action, which calls for intensive research on the territories’ health. Considering the indicative figures of the environmental pollution displayed in the case study, the scale of the pollution is significant and keeps growing. New studies of the local territories must be conducted by experts in the field, and further benchmarks and recovery strategies need to be developed accordingly. There is a need to establish a well-functioning monitoring system for the state of the environment, to ensure there is enough data for local decision-making.

Project proposal for civil society actors

Civil society is the core and main beneficiary of the environmental recovery projects for Ukraine. By common      understanding, those are the communities that live on specific geographical territories belonging to the state’s national territory, individuals that act in the interest of their communities or self-organised groups composed of active citizens that can be registered under various legal statuses.

Civil society has vast power over the actions taken on their territories; the issue is they don’t realise that. This also means that civil society actors can carry out a variety of actions in the field of environmental recovery projects.

Project 1. Political lobbying. National and local authorities and their representatives have been chosen as servants of the people who voted for them. Therefore, it’s the role of civil society to remind people in power to make choices that reflect this assignment. Civil society needs to take a stand for how the processes have to be organised on their territories and lobby their interests and needs by means of organising and signing petitions to the local government, sending individual letters to the authorities and institutions, establishing civil society supervisory board and making it a part of the local decision-making process. Even organising local gatherings and protests could be a way of expressing concerns over certain things happening on specific territories. 

Added to this, civil society has to demand strict market surveillance over the products and appliances circulating in the local markets. They have to require the national government to allow only energy-efficient appliances and products that have EU-level quality labels to be sold on the national market. Until this is regulated by the adoption of relevant political decisions and legislative acts, the local population will be in danger of procuring goods that are dangerous for already damaged and vulnerable environment.

Project 2. Holding a local assembly in collaboration with local authorities and selecting a board of public representatives to participate in drafting the environmental recovery projects and initiatives. Those publicly selected representatives will become a monitoring force for the recovery projects, ensuring that those initiatives are accountable. They will be able to issue honest feedback and report on the state of projects’ implementation, as well as monitor public spending to avoid corruption in the process of organising logistics and procurements of materials for those projects. This board will support the realisation of principles of accountability and transparency, and ensure an inclusivity of those projects. Such a board      of local public representatives will be necessary for every environmental recovery project, at least one board per city, to make sure that the local population has representation. 

Project 3. Every community that is physically located next to the territory that will require environmental restoration needs to lobby for the observation of the requirement of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). As of now, this requirement is not adopted in Ukrainian legislation as an obligatory form to be submitted together with project proposal files, which is why civil society lobbying on this is very important and has to be incorporated into environmental recovery projects.

Project 4. Civil society and its actors are individuals who have various professional formations, and depending on their capacity, they can collaborate with various local and international actors to draft and submit environmental restoration projects for funding calls.

Project 5. As individuals, civil society members need to adopt a proactive civil position. This may include volunteering for the existing local or national restoration initiatives and projects to get practical skills and replicate them on their own territories; and signing up for the courses offered by NGOs on environmental conservation, agroecology, sustainable agriculture, and environmental management; reaching out to local businesses and institutions and informing them on the need of holding a seminar, local event or discussion panel on those subjects. Overall, speaking up about the need to receive information about their territory and ways to preserve and restore the lands affected by the war and climate change. 

Project 6. Civil society can organise local action events, such as a river or territory’s clean-up in cooperation with the municipality, setting up the community garden or promoting recycling or composting practices. For example, setting up a community garden where everyone can plant various plants will mean creating common ownership zones that will be beneficial not only for practising various sustainable agriculture practices but also for boosting the community’s engagement in local action. Physically gathering people for the territory’s clean-up will help to learn more about the area, its vegetation, and the species present and will teach an appreciation of the resources that nature there provides. Small local actions make a difference not only in the health of the environment but also provide first-hand information on the space, support building trust among the members of the local communities and overall provide additional motivation for taking ownership of the territories. Local communities may also start the “greening up” process by planting local species of plants on public territories, their private properties and in specially designated zones.

Project 7. Individuals need to exercise their consumer power and prevent procuring and producing products that don’t follow the sustainability requirements to ensure the environment’s preservation. As consumers, individuals can boycott the products that may cause damage to the environment. This may mean opposing sales of pesticides that damage soils or rallying against mass plantations and the production of soil-destructive crops. 

Added to this, as a consumer, every individual has to review their dietary preferences and consider their food consumption. Individual preferences in food consumption have an effect on the environment and climate change, therefore it is important to be considered on the individual level. Changes in food habits need to be encouraged to prevent humanity from being a driver of even more intense climate changes and, subsequently, further environmental damage. Lastly, local communities have to encourage local food production and local farmers to adopt sustainable agricultural practices while producing food. Choosing local production over one sourced from abroad has to be encouraged to reduce the pollution coming from the logistics involved in the food production chain.