Long-aged reforms: which environmental bills parliament will consider during the new session

Ukraine's parliament has no shortage of environmental initiatives. At least on paper. The agenda of the sixteenth session of the Verkhovna Rada of the 9th convocation assigns 68 draft laws and resolutions to the Committee on Environmental Policy and Nature Management.

EcoPolitic analysed Resolution No. 4958-IX on the agenda of the current session, which began in September this year and is expected to last until around mid-January next year. We looked into which environmental bills stand a chance of reaching the session hall.

Making the list does not mean getting a vote

The agenda items are divided into two sections:

• The first contains 33 drafts already prepared for consideration at plenary sessions.
• The second contains another 35, which have only been assigned for preparation and further work before consideration at the session.

The difference is significant. Yet even inclusion in the first section guarantees neither a set voting date nor, still less, a positive decision.

Old debts and new attempts to settle them

Almost half of all documents scheduled for consideration – 33 initiatives – were registered in parliament before the full-scale invasion began. They cover both systemic European integration issues of environmental control and the Emerald Network, and narrower matters of hunting, animal protection and nature management.

Looking at the number of documents by topic, the largest group concerns hunting and fur farming: as many as 8 of the 33 bills are devoted to regulating this area. In second place are draft laws on the nature reserve fund and biodiversity protection (6 documents), and in third – animal protection (5 bills).

The considerable number of documents in the first block reflects the current trend: against the backdrop of the national ban on hunting, regional administrations are adopting decisions to permit it on their territory. Despite criticism from conservationists, the list of districts and oblasts where killing animals is allowed keeps gradually growing.

Will European integration have to wait?

Most of the European integration bills ended up in Section II, meaning they will be prepared for the session hall for some indefinite period of time.

Section I contains only three such documents – bills No. 9116, 15352 and 13578. MPs have already considered two of them during this session, and one entered into force on 4 October after being signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky.

European integration bills on the agenda of the sixteenth session

The bill with the longest history on this list is No. 3091 "On State Environmental Control". It was registered in parliament back in 2020, adopted as a basis in July 2021, and then work on it was put on hold for more than five years. Even the annual reminders from the European Commission that reforming the environmental control system is one of Ukraine's priority tasks in the environmental sphere have not made MPs speed up.

And now this bill is back on the agenda. We hope that during the current session MPs will manage to bring their work on it to a logical conclusion.

Here we also see two versions of a bill that stakeholders have been awaiting for years – "On Packaging and Packaging Waste". In September 2023, the Cabinet of Ministers headed by Denys Shmyhal registered it as No. 10066. In almost two years, the document never reached the first reading, and after the government's resignation it was automatically withdrawn. That is why the agenda now features two alternative bills submitted by MPs.

Section II of the parliamentary agenda also includes three MPs' bills on the functioning of the National Emissions Trading System (NETS). As a reminder, they appeared one after another during July, like mushrooms after rain.

Meanwhile, the ministry's draft law on the NETS, which had been repeatedly discussed with experts and stakeholders over the course of a year and was made public in May, was never registered in parliament. After the MPs' legislative initiatives appeared, it mysteriously disappeared from the public space, leaving businesses and experts completely in the dark about what is going on. In response to our request, Oleh Bondarenko, Chair of the Committee on Environmental Policy and Nature Management, said that the Committee currently has three bills that are sufficient for further consideration.

"I see no point in waiting for the ministry's bill; we are waiting for the European Commission's response and recommendations on the registered bills," he added.

Which initiatives dominate the list

We divided all 68 agenda items by area. The top ten looks like this:

Four more areas – environmental insurance, environmental control, tourism development and eco-labelling – have two drafts each. There is also one each on public administration, environmental protection, use of natural resources, civil protection, hydrometeorology, air protection, sustainable development and climate policy.

The documents added to the agenda also include some that the relevant committee recommended rejecting:

• No. 5696 "On Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine (on the protection of rare and endangered plant species listed in the Red Book of Ukraine from logging)";

• No. 15454-1 "On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine on Improving the Mechanisms for Granting and Exercising the Right to Subsoil Use".

However, such a recommendation does not end their parliamentary story: the final decision rests with the Verkhovna Rada.

Results will be judged by deeds

The environmental agenda of this session looks quite busy. It should be noted, however, that it is supplemented from time to time, so our list may be far from final. Some of its items have already survived several years of waiting, so judging parliament's work by the length of the list makes absolutely no sense. All the more so since quantity says nothing about quality.

At the end of the session, we will see which decisions MPs have adopted, whether they have retained effective environmental protection requirements, and which long-standing reforms have once again moved to the next agenda. A place on it can be kept for years, but the same cannot be said for forests, rivers and rare species.