The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine has redirected UAH 15.7 million from the environmental protection program to finance the newly created Institute for Ecological Restoration and Development of Ukraine.
The announcement of such a reallocation of budget funds allocated to the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine for 2025 was made on the Telegram channel of the government's representative in the Verkhovna Rada, Taras Melnychuk.
The government has withdrawn funds from the program “Implementation of Environmental Protection Measures, in particular to Improve the Environment” and added them to the program “Scientific and Scientific and Technical Activities in the Field of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources”.
Now, UAH 15.7 million, which could be used to finance the implementation of more than one environmental project, will be spent to “ensure the establishment and operation in 2025 of the newly created state scientific institution, the Institute for Ecological Restoration and Development of Ukraine.” This institution will be subordinated to the Ministry of Environment. And every year it will “bite off” a piece of the already modest environmental budget.
At every international event, the Ministry's top officials emphasize how diligently they care about the environment even during the war. But in fact, it turns out that environmental protection measures are not currently a priority at all. Because even the funds that could be spent on real projects with visible and tangible results, the Ministry of Environment prefers to spend them on writing another pile of useless papers with super-ambitious plans that will never come to fruition.
A month ago, EcoPolitic analyzed the expenditures of the Ukrainian Decarbonization Fund and found that there is a substitution of concepts when selecting projects for preferential lending. As a result, industrial enterprises, which are the main payers of the eco-tax, cannot get the funding they need to decarbonize their production.
We also wrote that, according to expert Liudmyla Tsyhanok, businesses are losing millions because of the environmental impact assessment procedure, and it needs to be rebooted.
