Kyiv recently hosted the first international conference “Cooperation for Sustainable Progress,” which was organized by a federation of Green parties in Europe and Asia. Delegates from 18 countries took part in the conference, among them the noted ecologist Prof. Aleksei Yablokov, corresponding member of Russia’s Academy of Sciences; Alexander Lykhotal, president and CEO of Green Cross International (Switzerland); Andrei Yatsenia, Senior Adviser, Private-Public Partnerships at the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction in Geneva (UN ISDR); the secretary of Denmark’s Green Party Jean Rene Bendix Thierry; Natalie Debono, a delegate form the European Green Party (Malta), and others. The conference passed a resolution on holding annual meetings of Green delegates within the framework of the Kyiv International Environmental Forum (KIEF).
Below I offer readers my ideas concerning the problems that were discussed at this conference, particularly the Ukrainian point of view in regard to sustainable development.
This conference coincided with the anniversary of the UN summit in Rio de Janeiro (1992), which marked mankind’s powerful intellectual breakthrough into the future. I was fortunate enough to take part in this summit as Ukraine’s first Minister of the Environment and signed a number of important agreements on behalf of Ukraine. Among the fundamental instruments signed in Rio de Janeiro were the Declaration on Environment and Development and Agenda 21.
The Rio conference launched into official circulation the concept of sustainable development, noting that the only way to secure long-term economic growth is by linking the process to measures aimed at protecting the environment. Among the slew of sustainable development ideas formulated in Rio de Janeiro was a clause stating that current progress must not be carried out to the detriment of development and environmental protection for the good of future generations.
One other thing: environmental protection is closely linked with the social and demographic situation. Social degradation and impoverishment result in environmental degradation and vice versa.
The Rio instruments were adopted in the romantic atmosphere that emerged at the end of the Cold War and the emergence of new independent states in Europe and Asia, when it seemed that the threat of a world nuclear conflict was history. It was the end of history, according to Francis Fukuyama. We believed at the time that countries were embarking on an entirely new kind of cooperation, starting from scratch as builders of democratic systems and independent civil societies.
I remember the Rio de Janeiro summit, where 178 world leaders met. Among them were George Bush, Sr., who applauded Fidel Castro’s speech; German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who talked with Russia’s Vice— President Aleksandr Rutskoi, one of the plotters of the future coup in that country; and Parliamentary Speaker of Ukraine Ivan Pliushch, who was introduced to a charming princess from Thailand, an Oxford graduate accompanied by two tough-looking generals. Most of the political leaders of that time are no longer working in the political arena, and the Rio principles are increasingly often being called into question.
Today, 15 years after the Rio summit, we have become aware that we are living in a world of new and harsh realities after the rosy post-Cold War period. There are new challenges, something that none of the political leaders could have dreamed of in 1992. We are faced with increasing terrorist threats; the struggle for steadily depleting natural resources — organic fuel, uranium, water, food — has intensified. There are new armed confrontations in the Middle East and a rising degree of inequality among countries and peoples, which is aggravated by the globalization process. Very little is being done in the world to foster the supremacy of the principles of sustainable development and to implement the Rio summit’s key ideas.
According to Prof. Yablokov, the crisis of human civilization is becoming more obvious, and it is transforming the ideas of sustainable development into a utopia. His skeptical approach is shared by a number of internationally acclaimed ecologists. Thus, according to the report Mapping the Global Future, published by the US Intelligence Council (2020 Project, 2004), the council, which was founded in order to develop scenarios until 2020, the main event will be communist China and India’s emergence in the world arena as new global players with populations totaling 2.7 billion and increasing needs for energy and mineral resources. The European Union and Russia (as well as Ukraine) will experience serious problems in the sphere of demography: manpower reductions and aging populations. The 80-percent world economic growth anticipated in 2020, compared to 2000, offers no chance of achieving any degree of balanced economic and ecological progress.
Among the global economic, ecological, geopolitical, social, and technological risks defined in the report Global Risks 2007, WEF, 2007 in Davos, “Climate change is now seen as one of the defining challenges of the 21st century — and as a global risk with impacts far beyond the environment changes in the climate are regarded as the greatest 21st century challenge, which will cause international and civil wars in the next 50 years.”
All crises and the approaching global storm notwithstanding, there is no reasonable alternative to sustainable development. Here one must realize that a universal recipe for this development is nonexistent. Each country must solve the problem of sustainable development proceeding from its own objectives, national specifics, and economic possibilities.
The structure of sustainable development is a complex one, resting on several pillars; here the sociopolitical situation plays an especially important role — as in the case of Ukraine — apart from the traditional economic, social, and ecological components.
It suffices to recall the brief history of independent Ukraine with its three presidents and fourteen governments that struggled through the whirlwind of current problems and were unable to see the future in order to realize just how unstable the state political post-Soviet system was, incapable of reaching beyond the paradigm of an industrial society.
Under these conditions, the complex program for implementing the decisions passed at the sustainable development summit in Johannesburg (2002), approved by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine in 2003, turned into yet another project that remained on paper. Such ornamental institutions as the National Council on Sustainable Development under the aegis of the President of Ukraine and the CMU’s National Commission on Sustainable Development were either never convened or reduced to consultative functions.
What sustainable development can be discussed in a country where there is a pitched, unprincipled struggle for power (in other words, for ways to steal national resources), with permanent interparty (interclan) and personal conflicts on the highest political level, which have turned Ukraine into Europe’s laughingstock? A country that allows a small group of oligarchs to uncontrollably and constantly increase their wealth, with the majority of the working masses on the verge of misery, breaches one of the basic laws of sustainable development, namely the harmonization of social standards and economic indices.
Against the deafening pomp of governments and parties advertising their singular economic achievements when they were in power in Ukraine (2004-07), the bitterly paradoxical fact remains that the GDP growth rate has made no impact on the living standard. Whereas in Poland, the GDP growth rate has reached $1,000 and added one year to the average lifespan (bringing the total to five years), in Ukraine the growth of the GDP has resulted in the shrinking by nine months of the average lifespan. Instead of juggling with GDP figures (i.e., tons of produced metal, coal, iron ore, chemical agents), the government should report to the people in terms of indices of human development: lifespan growth, better health, and education.
Over the past five years Ukraine’s population has fallen by 2.3 million (4.3 percent). This is especially true of the “thriving” Donbas, Dnipro, and Kharkiv regions that are devoted to the Party of Regions — in other words, Ukraine’s most socially and ecologically unsafe territories. The difference between the average lifespan in Ukraine and EU countries is between 10 and 11 years. Why don’t the parties that are always boasting about economic achievements ever talk about why men and women are dying at such an early age in Ukraine?
The unresolved question of land sales and the lack of agricultural reforms are bringing the countryside, once the backbone of the Ukrainian nation, to the brink of extinction. Experts estimate that the Ukrainian earth can feed about 300 million people.
All the programs and manifestos issued by political parties contain populist promises for the electorate, but they offer no strategic programs aimed at Ukraine’s future and its postindustrial progress by using science-oriented, energy— and resource-saving technologies.
Below I will focus on the main national problems of Ukraine’s future; problems that must be resolved now, unless Ukraine wants to end up on the sidelines of history.
1. ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION
Despite the GDP’s 60 percent drop in the 1990s and stoppages at a number of enterprises, the ecological situation has worsened. A document that was issued in Kyiv as part of a project of the United Nations Development Programme and the Global Ecological Foundation, entitled Assessment of the National Potential in the Sphere of Global Ecological Management in Ukraine (2007) states that one of Ukraine’s features is the presence of a considerable number of depressed regional territories with a considerable degree of ecological degradation; there is a stable background of chemical mutagenic and carcinogenic pollution of the atmosphere, bodies of water, and soils, which considerably surpasses established hygienic standards; a large part of the Ukrainian population obtains fresh water with considerable deviations from fixed standards.
There are 400 tons of industrial waste for every Ukrainian citizen. Our country is engulfed by heaps of household rubbish, especially in the Crimea, which is quickly losing its famous health resort and recreational capacities; it looks as though the Crimeans, exhausted by their ecological and daily problems, will soon be spending their vacations in Antalya [Turkey] where the sea, air, and beaches are far cleaner.
Ukraine’s political leadership must acknowledge the sad truth that our country has become perhaps the dirtiest in Europe, and not only in terms of politics. We are witness to the refutation of the myth about Ukrainian cleanliness.
Therefore, cleansing is the first slogan for Ukraine’s sustainable development. Without reforming the local housing authorities and establishing cooperation with big business, this slogan will never be implemented.
However, the entire leadership of the country (no matter who comes to power) must show a consolidated will to combat environmental degradation. They must ensure that the budget contains not 0.5 percent of the GDP and not even five percent but seven to eight percent in order to get the cleansing project started.
2. THE STATE OF POWER ENGINEERING
Power engineering defines not only Ukraine’s weak geopolitical point and its dependence on external factors, but also exerts a fundamental impact on its ecological situation.
Ukraine’s main power-engineering problem has long been known: energy consumption here is three to four times higher than in any European country; it is nine times higher than in Japan. A harsh struggle against such a destructive consumption of energy and taxpayers’ money should have long become the first national political priority. It never has, although there are many programs that have all remained on paper.
A mere 0.7 percent of energy is being generated through so- called green power sources, although Ukraine’s potential promises up to 20 percent of such sources by 2015, as envisaged by the European Union’s directives.
Instead of focusing on these priorities, Ukraine’s governments develop plants for giant nuclear power engineering projects. One such project envisages the construction of another 22 nuclear power units, including 11 on new sites in Ukraine. What is this if not an irresponsible approach to one’s own country and fellow Ukrainians, who experienced the Chornobyl disaster? Here everything is ignored, including the cost of each power unit, which Ukraine simply cannot afford (costs range from one to 1.6 billion dollars, depending on the unit’s generating capacity; British experts estimate the construction of a 1,200 MW nuclear power plant at 2.4 billion pounds sterling, or more than 4 billion dollars (Nuclear Issues Paper, No. 5, Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2005). Also ignored are the high costs of nuclear power engineering, the lack of water resources and qualified personnel — people who are trained to build and run such nuclear power plants — as well as construction project terms (10-15 years), society’s unwillingness to become hostages to nuclear power engineering, and finally the absence of support for these absurd projects on the part of the EU, with which Ukraine is seemingly getting ready to integrate.
Ukraine’s power engineering is a battlefield for those who support sustainable development and those who ignore all economic and ecological laws in order to turn Ukraine back to the 1970s-1980s, when the USSR’s omnipotent Sredmash sought to turn an obedient Ukraine into a nuclear testing range and radioactive waste dump — a problem that is still unresolved on a global level.
A nationwide discussion of national priorities, involving representatives of the public and foreign experts, would best serve Ukraine and its progress, rather than referendums aimed at the destruction of the Ukrainian language and establishment of this country’s mythical neutral status.
3. DEMOGRAPHIC SITUATION
The propagandistic measures of governments and political parties in order to stimulate our birth rate by issuing cash bonuses are not efficient enough. The main thing is to reduce the mortality rate of able-bodied men and deaths stemming from traumas, especially as a result of road accidents, and to get the AIDS/TB/drug abuse and alcoholism situation under control.
We know how to combat these evils; all we need is the political leadership’s will to head in the right direction and its understanding of the threats facing our society. We must have quick and effective reforms in the health care system, which is practically destroyed in the current economic and social realities.
We must stop — or at least curb — the nationwide “beerification” of Ukraine, thanks to which millions of young alcoholics are being created. Are the interests of brewery and distillery tycoons more important than Ukraine’s future?
4. CLIMATE CHANGES
These changes have become a reality for both Europe and Ukraine. In 2005, the atmospheric CO2 concentration exceeded the average range in the past 650,000 years. Eleven of the past twelve years (1995-2006) were the hottest since ground surface temperatures started being recorded in 1850. “On the continental, regional, and ocean scales, numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns, and extreme weather, including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves, and the intensity of tropical cyclones.” These are not passages from a horror story but excerpts from the report Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis published by the British Council in Ukraine. In 2007 The Independent wrote that “...if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates, global warming by the end of the century could total 6.4C. The scientists don’t say so explicitly, but a rise in temperatures of this magnitude would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe.”
Problems relating to climate changes are not limited to the Kyoto Protocol, whereby Ukraine is entitled to sell hothouse gas emission quotas. The key is to draft a special national program aimed at preparing Ukraine to live and work in conditions of global warming, with deserts expanding and levels of the world’s oceans rising. How to manage farms in drought-stricken areas, how to save elderly people, how to help children survive heat waves, how to create an infrastructure and avoid the onslaught of millions of ecological refugees — these and other issues must be faced and coped with by the state.
5. ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS
The phosphorus spill in Ozhydiv this past summer demonstrated that Ukraine’s Ministry of Emergency Situations and Chornobyl Affairs and local authorities are not prepared to cope with such disasters. The sad lesson of Chornobyl has apparently not been learned; in Ozhydiv there was evidence of lack of coordination on the part of authorities, as well as concealment and delay of information.
Considering that Ukraine today has some 1,000 ecologically unsafe systems and installations, obsolete equipment, and the high risk of further breakdowns and disasters, it is high time to create a single National Emergency Management Center to coordinate the efforts of relevant ministries and agencies. It is extremely important to draft a critical infrastructure protection plan — energy, transport, chemical, nuclear, defense, communications, and other systems. This matter was raised at the 17th Economic Forum that took place in Krynica (September 2007, Poland).
It is also worth considering the proposal contained in the report Global Risks 2007 to create the post of Global Risk Administrator for Ukraine, who would be in a position to determine national priorities in this sphere.
Who else but the president and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine should concern themselves with this issue?
6. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT TO BE APPROVED BY THE STATE AND SOCIETY
This is probably the most difficult task, one that calls for intellectual courage, strategic thinking, and responsibility to future generations. The ideas of sustainable development should be included in the new Constitution of Ukraine and the European integration plan, and become a component of a national project for the next 50 years. They must be accepted and adopted by the people.
The new generation of Ukrainians does not want to bend beneath the weight of the post-Soviet traditions of nepotism, clannish protectionism, provincialism, lies, and corruption. Our people are sick and tired of living in a country that ranks at the bottom of lists, alongside the chaotic and crisis-ridden countries of Africa and Asia. The people’s loss of confidence in all state institutions without exception — the president, government, parliament, and political parties — has reached a critical limit.
If our decision-makers continue to ignore the fundamental needs of the people and society while continuing to squabble in their petty struggle for power, substituting a serious discussion of Ukraine’s future with pop concerts, bucketsful of dirt, and talk shows, our country will suffer a catastrophe and our politicians will be cursed by future generations.
Yurii Shcherbak is the president of the Vernadsky Institute for the Sustainable Development of Ukraine.
