Members of the Ukrainian Environmental Group (UPG) called on the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine to prevent deforestation for sand mining at the Potashnyansky deposit in the Kyiv region.
They posted the corresponding appeal on Facebook.
Activists said that the company Ukr Capital Resource LLC received permission to extract sand from the mentioned deposit, which covers an area of 66.8 hectares. In size, this is equal to about 95 football fields.
According to them, the environmental impact assessment procedure has already begun to determine the possible environmental risks and consequences of this extraction. But the problem is that there is a healthy pine forest on this territory.
Photo: facebook.com/UkrainianNatureConservationGroup.
The environmentalists said that there are juniper groups in it, which are protected by the Green Book of Ukraine and are under threat of extinction.
Photo: facebook.com/UkrainianNatureConservationGroup.
Activists noted that even the State Agency of Forest Resources of Ukraine, according to the position published on the website, considers mining in such forests inadmissible.
"Imagine: instead of a picturesque forest – a sand quarry! And this is in the Buchansk district, where hundreds of hectares of forests were destroyed by the Russian aggressor in 2022. Are commercial interests trying to defeat nature again?” – asked the UPG.
More recently, the activists of the group have drawn the attention of the ministry to the problem that exists when conducting auctions for the right to use subsoil. They recalled that on April 30 of this year, at that time, Minister Ruslan Strelets said that "it is important that the state, even before placing the lot at the auction, should fully investigate the issue of the existence of any restrictions on the right to carry out subsoil extraction, and only after that make a decision on carrying out auction".
But since that moment, there have been no positive developments in solving this issue: the Ministry of the Environment has not developed and approved any regulatory documents in this regard in the Cabinet of Ministers.
The UPG is confident that the problem can be solved even without changes to the legislation.
"It is enough to simply analyze all the areas for which the State Geological Survey has approved the results of geoexploration. And to exclude from them those where there are environmental protection restrictions on production", – say experts of the group.
They said that they wanted to do it as a public organization. But they were told by the State Geological Survey that information about peat deposits is a state secret.
"But if the businessman pays a little to the Geoinform enterprise subordinated to the State Geonadram, then the data is no longer so secret. The main thing is to pay. Even a separate service is "pre-project monitoring". It looks a bit like corruption...", environmentalists noted.
That's why they offered to make such an analysis to the specialists of the Ministry of Environment. The UPG noted that over the past year, the ministry has been doing a good job of preventing mining rights from being auctioned on really valuable territories and suggested extending this experience to other areas that have restrictions on the right to mine.
At the beginning of September, EcoPolitic told that the Specialized Environmental Prosecutor's Office of the Prosecutor General's Office is in court was able to protect the unique natural monument "Poppy Swamp" in the Rivne region from destruction due to peat extraction.
