Legal Instruments for Collecting and Transmitting of Information/data by the Public in the Process of Post-war Environmental Reconstruction of Ukraine
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The article is devoted to the legal issues regarding ensuring proper collection and transmission of information/data in Ukraine, which may influence decision-making in the process of environmental restoration of Ukraine and holding Russia accountable. Access to environmental information, its collection, transmission and analysis during military operations is an extremely urgent issue. Despite this, currently, there are certain legal problems connected to the access to environmental data, which should be in open and transparent access, and difficulties with legal instruments that can ensure the final result, that is, the adoption of environmentally significant decisions. The open data system was analyzed and it was concluded that improving access to environmental information, improving civic awareness of environmental problems, and the ability to conduct monitoring and collect data give the civic organizations and individual citizens the opportunity to express their interest, and for state bodies to develop an appropriate list of such interests and stimulate an increase in the role of the public in the decision-making process that may affect the state of the environment. The article explores the concepts of “public”, “interested public”, and analyzes the international experience of projects within the framework of “citizen science”, which involve the use by scientists of data collected by volunteers, non-professionals, observers who do not specialize in any particular field of knowledge. It is proved that even during a full-scale invasion in Ukraine, citizen science projects are actively developing, which contain not only a scientific, but also a security component. For Ukraine, this is one of the most important moments, since after the war the issue will be acute not so much about modernization or revival of the old, but about proposals for the fundamentally new approaches to environmental restoration, including proposals for digitalization or other technologies in the field of collection, transmission and analysis of information and data related to the environment. The main initial steps towards the country’s ecological restoration should take place in the areas of atmospheric air, land and water resources, nature reserves, waste management, ensuring energy security, and increasing environmental education and the role of the public in environmental issues. To solve the problems of post-war environmental restoration within the framework of our topic, it is worth focusing on the following tasks of providing legal instruments regarding: data collection (in the form of either access to information or environmental monitoring), data transmission (in an easy, accessible and, above all, modern form) and data analysis, which should be carried out by the party that makes decisions on issues related to the negative impact on the state of the environment.
Source: Constitutional State
Author: O. V. Tolkachenko
Institution: Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4409767572