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Laws on Environmental Protection
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2.2. Laws on environmental protection
The evaluation of legislative framework in support of biological diversity in the Dnipro Basin in terms of its compliance with the Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian national legislations is a difficult and complicated matter, since these countries have no integrated systems in place for regulating this multifaceted natural system. The legislation on natural resources has traditionally regulated the issues of use and protection of separate natural features or sites. The environmental legislation systems of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have a propensity for an approach based on “natural resources”. In other words, the environmental legislation is classified on the basis of dividing the environment into natural features (land, mineral resources, water, flora and fauna, atmospheric air) and regulating each of these separately. The three countries’ effective legislation has such branches as land, water, forest (legal treatment of flora), mining (legal treatment of subsoil assets) and fauna (legal treatment of wildlife) law, as well as legal protection of atmospheric air. The above classification evolved within the Soviet legislation and was objectively determined by the underdevelopment of the conservational aspects of environmental relations in the 1960-1970s (when the legislation on natural resources was adopted), on the one hand, and by the non-existence of the very notion of “biological diversity” in the national legislations, on the other. Thus, the participating countries lack comprehensive legislations regulating biodiversity protection, while the national environmental laws do not define the category of “biodiversity” in legal terms. That is why the analysis of the Dnipro Basin biodiversity legislation necessarily included the study of laws of the Russian Federation, the Republic of Belarus and Ukraine on environmental protection and regulatory instruments regarding the protection of separate natural features: fauna and flora, water, rare and endangered plant and animal species, specially protected areas.
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National strategies to Conserve biological diversity