Why is a strategic environmental assessment of state planning documents such as municipal development strategies important? How has the recently-launched Unified National Environmental Impact Assessment Registry improved this procedure?

The Unified National Environmental Impact Assessment Registry was launched in May 2023. The implications of this Registry and the importance of strategic environmental assessment (SEA), which it affects, were discussed at the online seminar “Strategic Environmental Assessment of State Planning Documents of Local Self-Government Bodies” in the Regional Office of U-LEAD in the Khmelnytskyi Oblast.

“When developing a Municipal Development Strategy, the working group should understand that the SEA is not just a formal document required by law. A quality SEA is a solid foundation for the steps to implement the strategy, including when writing project applications for attracting external funding,” said Dmytro Vasylenko, Head of this Regional Office.

After all, SEA is helpful for considering alternatives and finding mutually beneficial solutions and enables taking into account the perspectives of all stakeholders at an early stage. SEA allows for focusing the decision-making process towards balanced development and contributes to the overall transparency of strategy development.

“First and foremost, we need to understand that development priorities should not conflict with environmental priorities. Rather, they should be determined by analysing internal and external factors, such as the quality of the environment, environmental trends, availability of resources, regulatory and legal framework, etc.

In practice, this means that any planned activities that initially give a visible economic effect but ultimately result in the deterioration of the quality of the environment, the disruption of the balance of demographic processes and the depletion of natural resources will be contrary to the principles of balanced development and cannot have a place in strategic documents in general,” said Yulia Polishchuk, Adviser on Decentralisation and Local Self-Government at U-LEAD with Europe in the Cherkasy Oblast.

Therefore, a high-quality SEA enables the most effective decision-making that considers economic, social and environmental principles and priorities as well as further implementation processes. Extensive public engagement — a guarantee of balanced and effective decision-making and further implementation processes — plays an important part in the strategic environmental assessment.

With this in mind, U-LEAD experts provided practical advice for municipalities to develop their own SEAs:

• When starting work on a SEA, consider your personnel potential (availability of environmental professionals);
• Involve environment, geography, soil experts etc. in your work;
• Start work after forming strategic and operational goals and objectives and announcing the call for project ideas;
• The preparation of the SEA according to the procedure takes about 3 months;
• After determining the scope of the SEA, promptly send inquiries for open information to state bodies
• Commission an overview of the natural environment within the municipality: water, atmospheric air, soil survey;
• Organise an active awareness-raising and motivational campaign to engage the general public at the stage of public discussion of the SEO project.

Keep in mind that non-implementation of SEA and violation of the SEA procedure are grounds for annulment of decisions of local self-government bodies on approval of state planning documents and recognition of state planning documents as invalid.