Eco-payments point to the goal – Newspaper Kommersant No. 221 (7422) of 11/29/2022
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The government is pushing the regions to strengthen the environmental component of their budgets: the White House has submitted amendments to the law “On Environmental Protection” to the State Duma, which should start the process of eliminating toxic dumps and industrial sites in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The federal part of the project on the inventory of objects of accumulated environmental damage is financed directly from the budget, while the regions and municipalities will have to spend on it the “colored” funds that come to them from environmental fees, fines and court payments. In total, we are talking about tens of billions of rubles of such payments per year, the increase in their fees is hindered by the incompleteness of reforms in the field of ecology and regional discord in their administration. Taking into account the fact that even before the start of the inventory, the regions reported about 2,000 toxic sites that need to be eliminated, the level of revenues will delay their reclamation for an indefinite period.
The White House submitted bill No. 242404-8 to the State Duma – these are amendments to the law “On Environmental Protection”, regulating the work of the subjects of the Russian Federation and municipalities in fixing, inventorying and assessing objects of accumulated harm. Recall that the most famous such facilities were the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill and the site of the former chemical production of Usolekhimprom in the city of Usolye-Sibirsky, Irkutsk Region – the latter attracted the attention of the federal center in 2020, the problem had to be solved locally with the participation of Rosatom, chemical troops and the National Guard (see. “ Kommersant, dated July 31, 2020), and systemically – changes in legislation that do not allow companies to get rid of toxic production until the aftermath of environmental disasters and “color” business environmental payments to the budget to use them to eliminate abandoned and ownerless toxic landfills (see. “ Kommersant” dated March 4, 2021) – permission for such “coloring” was recorded, among other things, by government decree No. 1370 dated August 2, 2022.
The current bill of the Ministry of Natural Resources describes in detail the procedures for identifying, evaluating and inventorying such sites (on municipal lands this will have to be done by local authorities, on the rest – regional). When identifying and assessing the scale of the consequences of environmental disasters for citizens and nature, objects of accumulated harm will be recorded in a special register, broken down into categories, and as the accumulated harm is eliminated, they will be excluded from it according to a methodology that the Ministry of Natural Resources has yet to develop.
The category assigned to toxic industrial sites will determine their place in the cleanup queue. The reclamation process itself is described routinely in the project: engineering surveys, project formation (using the best available technologies), state expertise (including mandatory state environmental), work (under the supervision of the federal authorities – remote or full-time), control and acceptance. The regional authorities will deal with this, but the bill allows the formation of a list of environmental disasters on a federal scale – federal state bodies authorized by the government will deal with it; they also include issues of harm assessment, “the implementation of which requires, among other things, special studies and laboratory tests,” and control of results.
The Ministry of Natural Resources describes only the approximate scale of this activity: according to the data of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation, 1929 objects of accumulated harm have been identified on the territory of the country, but their exact number “is still unknown, in addition, there is no reliable information about the degree of danger of the impact of such objects on the health of citizens and their life expectancy” , according to the explanatory note. The federal project General Cleaning is called upon to provide methodological support for obtaining such data, and the participation of federal authorities in it will also be paid from its funds (1.9 billion rubles in 2023 and 4.7 billion rubles in 2024) – this money already budgeted. Regions and municipalities will be able to spend “colored” funds of environmental fees, fines and court payments for damage to the environment (Articles 16.6, 75.1, 78.2 of the basic law) on the search, identification and registration of toxic objects – which, we note, should stimulate them increase activity in the administration of such payments.
The total receipts of environmental funds to the budgets of all levels in 2021 were assessed in detail by the Accounts Chamber (see Kommersant dated August 27, 2021) – then it was about the amount of funds about 20 billion rubles a year. However, standards and tariffs are gradually tightening – for example, in 2021 a new methodology for calculating the amount of damage caused to atmospheric air as a component of the natural environment came into force – only it, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources, could increase budget collections to 27 billion rubles. in year. However, the problem remains regional disparity in the administration of these non-tax payments: in total, according to the estimates of the same Accounts Chamber, only fixed debts of companies on them in 2017–2020 amounted to 16.5 billion rubles, despite the fact that the coverage and accounting of such fees due to for the ongoing reforms of the waste industry, extended producer responsibility for product and packaging waste, etc. in these years can by no means be called complete.
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