Formation of legal support of climate-protective farming in Ukraine: problems under martial period

Abstract

The article investigates both theoretical issues of the formation of global climate protection policy as well as the formation of climate-protective legislation in the agrarian sphere of Ukraine. In the search for means of countering global climate threats, scientists formulated the scientific concept of “climate security” as a strategic goal for unifying efforts to counter the on set of climate catastrophes. An important tool in achieving the goal of ensuring climate security is law and legislation as its applied means of influencing human behavior in all spheres of life. The priority in the establishment of legal support for climate protection belongs to international legislation, which most fully reflect the common interests of our civilization. Such acts include the 2004 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. At the same time, in December 2019, the European Union adopted a fundamentally new climate protection program – the European Green Deal energy transition program, the implementation of which has to make Europe neutral in terms of climate changes by 2050. Later, national governments began to adopt similar legal acts. Thus, in 2021, President Biden signed adecree on the development of “green” energy, the Green New Deal, which should ensurethat the United States achieves 100% of “clean” (climate-safe) electricity generation by 2035. Ukraine has also prepared an ambitious plan for climate protection transformation of its own energy system, aimed at increasing the share of renewable energy sources in the country’s energy balance to 25% by 2035. However, Russian aggression against Ukraine caused significant damage to the implementation of this plan. Russia, playing a key role inproviding European countries with fossil energy carriers (oil, gas, coal) and threatening to stop their supplies, has embarked on the path of using such energy carriers as energy weapons against Ukraine and the EU countries. In such conditions, the issue of giving up coal and gas went beyond the climate security problem and became a factor of the energy security of the European continent. The EU’s response to such a challenge consists in adoption by the European Commission in May 2022 of the REPowerEU energy reform plan, which proposes to accelerate the transition of the EU’s energy system from fossil fuels to the use of clean (“green”) energy sources. An important role in the implementation of the REPowerEU plan is given to the transition of agriculture as one of the sources of climate deterioration to the usage of green technologies. The severity of the climatic factor dictates the need to make changes to the key traditional directions of the agrarian policy of many countries of the world. In our opinion, the strategy of legal provision of climatic safety ofthe agrarian sphere should include two directions: adaptation of agriculture to intensive climatic changes and prevention of their onset. In Ukraine, the main direction of the country’s legal system’s response to climate change consists in adaptation of agriculture to new climatic conditions. At the same time the legal protection against the onset of climatic changes unfavorable for the agrarian sector has not been properly developed in the agrarian legislation of Ukraine. We believe that the development of law as a means of preserving aclimatic environment favorable for agricultural production should be based on the concept of climate protective agriculture, which covers both adaptation to climate changes and prevention of their occurrence. It seems that the Russian-Ukrainian war actualized the need for scientists and legislators to pay more attention to the problem of legal protection against the onset of new climatic threats to agriculture. Russian aggression against Ukraine coursed harm not only our country, but also triggered several global crises: food (violation of foodsecurity of varying degrees, including famine in a few African and other countries), humanitarian (movement of millions of refugees from Ukraine to other countries), legal (violation of the international legal order established after the Second World War) and the energy crisis. The global energy crisis affected the lives of the population of the planet Earth with two economic consequences. The first of them is a sharp increase in the prices of energy carriers produced from fossil fuels (oil, gas, etc.). And the second one is a continuation of the first and consists in the growth of economic profitability of grow ingenergy crops (willow, poplar, miscanthus, switchgrass) and agricultural plants, in particular, corn for use as raw material for the production of thermal and electrical energy and biomethane. With high prices for traditional energy sources produced from fossil fuels, the production of energy sources from energy crops has become very profi table. But large are a sof land are needed to grow such crops. In general, the search for such lands is a difficult task,since all the lands of Ukraine have already been distributed and are used for other purposes. At the same time, because of military actions, 34% of the territory of Ukraine already has asystematic violation of the surface layer of soils or their contamination with harmful military substances. World experience shows that a certain part of lands damaged by military actions became unsuitable for food production for 20, 30, or even 100 years. In addition, Ukraine has about 5 million hectares of degraded, polluted land or simply unproductive agricultural land. In our opinion, it is precisely on such lands that energy agriculture should be developed in the first place. Modern land law of Ukraine, which regulates the use and protection of the country’s lands, is built on two basic principles – the principle of food security and the principle of environmental security. We believe that in order to create an effective system of legal support for “energy farming”, these two basic principles should be supplemented with another one - the principle of bioenergy security, which gives legal priority to the use of partof the country’s land for the needs of growing raw materials for the production of green, climate safe energy resources. This principle should be implemented in the legal regulation of land relations. In our opinion, to ensure the proper use and protection of energy farming lands to provide the capacities of “green” energy with climate-safe raw materials for the production of relevant energy carriers, it is advisable to define their special legal regime. For this, the Land Code of Ukraine should be added a system of legal norms that define the notion and types of land for energy agriculture, the procedure for transferring agricultural and other lands to land for energetic agriculture, the powers of authorities regarding granting such land into ownership and use, the list of subjects of rights on land plots provided for the needs of energy farming, the procedure for placing “green” energy enterprises or their separate production facilities on such lands, as well as the specific requirements for legal protection of energy farming lands. Thus, the implementation of the mentioned proposal sregarding the development of the legal doctrine and improvement of the legal provision of energetic agriculture will contribute to strengthening the legal protection of the climate from the negative consequences of two factors: the first is production of energy resources using fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) and second consists in emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the soil cover, since the cultivation of perennial trees and other plantations for the needs of green energy will be accompanied by the binding of this gas by soilsubstances (organisms) and will prevent their emissions into the atmosphere. The proposed changes to the land legislation of Ukraine will not lead to Ukraine losing its status as aleading agrarian country in the world but will contribute to the acquisition of the status of aleading country in Europe, whose agriculture produces climate-protective energy resources and provides them to EU countries. Key words: climate, war, agriculture, land, law, “green” energy, energetic farming.