Speakers
Description
The State Environmental Expertise in the Russian Federation is the most important mechanism for ensuring the environmental safety of planned economic and other activities. The State Environmental Expertise (SEE) is regulated by federal laws and regulations. Regional SEEs are also regulated by regional draft laws. The main legal act which regulate the basic aspects of SEE is the Federal Law No. 174-FZ "On environmental expertise". It establishes the current lists of objects for state environmental expertise and thus determines the proportion of planned economic activities that have a mandatory preliminary assessment of environmental risks. An equally important feature of the Federal Law "On environmental expertise" is its dynamism. It reflects changes made to other federal laws that determine the need for SEE at any project.
The foundations of environmental expertise, established in 1995, are still being actively developed. In spite of the significant number of scientific studies of a legal nature regarding environmental expertise in Russia, the environmental assessment of the 25-year period development of this environmental issues’ regulation mechanism is presented in a fragmented manner.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the dynamics of changes in the objects of state environmental expertise composition at the federal level in the period from 1995 to 2020. The material used for the study is open data on the conduct of environmental expertise, which is posted on the official websites of “Rosprirodnadzor (Federal Service for Natural Resources Supervision)" and its regional entities.
The study applied an approach based on an analysis of changes in Russian Environmental Legislation during the study period in relation to SEE facilities. The latter were divided into 60 types of documentation, which were conventionally divided into 10 major groups:
- "Regulatory and Legal Acts" (RLAs)
- "Integrated environmental permit"
- "Marine activities"
- "Waste related activities"
- "Artificial land plots on water bodies"
- "Mining excavation with waste"
- "Capital construction objects of 1st category"
- "Gas stations, operations with fuels and lubricants in water protection zones in Kaliningrad region"
- "Construction in the buffer zone of the Baikal nature area"
- "Construction in the Arctic zone".
It was divided as well as into combined groups:
-"Regulatory Acts"
-"Maritime Activities"
-"Land Activities".
Within each group, a different number of individual types of SEE objects were observed in different periods, which formed a dynamic structure of the list of SEE objects that is difficult to analyze. The analysis of aggregated groups shows different trends of changes in the composition of SEE objects. Comparison of the dynamics of the number of individual objects for the 3 major areas of SEE (combined group "Regulatory Acts", combined group "Maritime Activities", combined group "Land activities") shows that the 2006’s observed trend of smoothing growth of the total number of individual SEE objects is the result of multidirectional processes such as a decrease in the number of objects related to the development of regulatory acts and marine activities, which occur against a steady trend of increasing the number of SEE objects among onshore and inland activities projects.
Over the 1995-2020 period, the greatest changes were in the share of onshore facilities, primarily due to changes in construction facilities and regulation of waste-related activities.
In fact, this is the formation of a structured approach to the selection of SEE objects, in which individual activities from different areas have already been included in the list of SEE objects by 2020.
| Publication | Impact Factor journals |
|---|---|
| Affiliation of speaker | University ITMO, Saint-Petersburg state university |
