The creation of a new ‘mega-ministry’ that will unite the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine, the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food, and the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources carries risks of slowing down the direction of work of each of them, but potentially provides an opportunity to implement systemic changes.
These are the opinions expressed by experts, scientists, environmentalists and civil society activists regarding the Ministry of Environmental Protection's entry into the new unified agency, which is informally called the Ministry of Resources. They were gathered by EcoPolitics.
Lyudmyla Tsyhanok, president of the PAEW Association of Environmental Professionals, believes that such a merger could be the key to integrating environmental logic into all sectors of the economy. She says that successful countries and companies have long been integrating for efficiency.
The expert warned that it would be difficult and that it would be necessary to fight for the subjectivity of the environmental block.
"But it is in a joint format that real transformation management is possible. And we should not be a party to conflict, but a party to solutions," she said.
The expert stressed that if environmental policy is strongly represented in the single economic decision centre, it will be a chance for systemic change.
A different opinion was expressed by Svitlana Berzina, head of the All-Ukrainian NGO Living Planet. She believes that the merger of the three ministries ‘may exacerbate a number of problems in all three sectors, lead to imbalances, loss of human resources and significantly slow down the European integration processes established over the past 2 years in all three authorities’.
The expert recalled that as a result of her work in the combined Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Environment, Ukraine received a score of 1 out of 5 for approximating national legislation to EU environmental law.
‘After the separation of these ministries, a lot of efforts were made to restore and systematically work, which was appreciated by the European Commission during the screening in June this year,’ said Svitlana Berzina.
According to Petro Testov, head of the analytical department at the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, nature protection will be on the back burner in the new ministry. He also fears the loss of the Ministry's professional staff.
The environmentalist predicts that such a merger will paralyse the work of the ministries for some time, and there will be a critical shortage of competent specialists who would develop regulatory documents related to European integration.
"I am sure that after a while they will realise their mistake again and start rebuilding the ministry from scratch. But we will lose both time and nature...", said Testov, sadly.
Volodymyr Boreyko, director of the Kyiv Ecological and Cultural Centre, considers the merger of the three ministries a crime.
"This is not just a mistake – it is a crime. To close down the Ministry of Environmental Protection in a country that is almost entirely suffering from local environmental crises. Where forests are being destroyed, the air is being ungodly polluted, rivers are drying up, the last areas of steppes are being ploughed up, hundreds of species of animals and plants are disappearing, and terrible erosion is devouring the soil," the ecologist believes.
Iryna Fedoriv, head of the Golka civic initiative, believes that the merger of the three ministries during the war is a blow to the state's institutional capacity and national security.
‘Only those who see the future of their grandchildren not in this country can vote for this three-storey bed (Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Economy),’ the activist believes.
As EcoPolitics recently reported, representatives of numerous NGOs published a joint statement on the inadmissibility of liquidating the Ministry of Environmental Protection as a separate agency and merging it with the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Agriculture.
We also informed that the newly created ministry will be headed by former First Deputy Minister of Economy Oleksiy Sobolev.
