The Senate's next plenary session discussed the law on “Environmental Expertise, Environmental Impact Assessment, and Strategic Environmental Assessment.”
The new version of the Law reflects the following:
1. Based on the principles of "electronic government," legal foundations for a unified automated information system for environmental impact assessment are being established. This mechanism provides opportunities for business entities to submit materials related to environmental expertise online and receive conclusions of the environmental expertise.
2. The new version of the Law is being supplemented with legal norms for the implementation of the Strategic Environmental Assessment institution, based on international practice. This, in turn, creates opportunities to determine, assess, and prevent the environmental consequences of activities through environmental assessment of strategic documents such as state programs, concepts, and urban planning documents, which have not been subjected to environmental expertise to date.
3. An Experts' Council is being established to ensure the impartiality and substantiation of the conclusions of the state environmental expertise, to review applications received by the expertise units, and to resolve problematic and controversial issues related to the conduct of the expertise.
A collegial approach to the consideration and resolution of these issues, instead of engaging experts and specialists for conducting state environmental expertise, creates opportunities and ensures the transparency of the environmental expertise conclusions.
4. As a result of categorizing objects of environmental expertise based on the degree of impact on the environment into three categories, objects of the fourth category, which have a local impact on the environment, are being removed from the list. This reduces inconveniences, bureaucratic barriers, and cuts time and costs for thousands of small business entities.
5. The terms for undergoing environmental expertise are being reviewed, which, in turn, facilitates business entities' operations.
6. Legal foundations are being established for introducing qualification certificates for project developing organizations and for forming the rating of organizations.
This prevents the preparation of documents that are poor quality and non-compliant with environmental standards, and it contributes to reducing the excessive time and financial expenses of business entities, and to increasing the responsibility and accountability of project developers.
7. Separate norms are being introduced to widely involve the public in the environmental impact assessment processes, particularly, to set the regulations for public environmental expertise and public hearings.
The Law ensures the rights of citizens to a comfortable environment and reliable information about its condition, creates legal foundations for public discussion of urban planning project documents. It also serves to increase the responsibility of the participants of the state environmental expertise institution, particularly, ecologists-experts, and to improve the quality of the documents and draft environmental norms presented for state environmental expertise.
The Law was approved by the senators.
