Administrative and legal mechanisms for ensuring environmental safety under climate change: the experience of Ukraine and prospects for harmonization with EU Standards

Abstract

The relevance of the study is determined by the growing scale of climate change, which is transforming environmental policy and the state's environmental safety governance system. In the context of Ukraine’s integration into the European Union's legal space, modernising administrative and legal mechanisms to ensure the implementation of sustainable development principles, climate adaptation, and economic decarbonization becomes a priority. The purpose of the paper is to examine the transformational processes within Ukraine’s administrative and legal framework for environmental safety, to determine its compliance with European standards, and to substantiate the ways of adapting legal mechanisms to the challenges of EU climate policy. The methodological framework combines systemic and comparative-legal approaches, institutional analysis, structural-functional assessment, and indicative analysis based on the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and the Sustainable Development Goals Index (SDG Index). The study also relies on international instruments, including Directive 2008/50/EC, Directive 2010/75/EU, Regulation (EU) 2021/1119 (EU Climate Law), the European Green Deal, and the EU Adaptation Strategy 2021. The results reveal that Ukraine demonstrates moderate progress in decarbonization, air quality improvement, and climate policy development; however, persistent structural problems persist in waste management, water, and forest resource governance. The main directions of harmonising national environmental legislation with EU law were analysed, obstacles of an institutional, financial, and technological nature were identified, and ways to overcome them to optimise the environmental management system were identified. The study proposes a conceptual framework for improving administrative and legal regulation of environmental safety based on the principles of Regulation – Responsibility – Resilience – Reporting, which integrates legislative modernisation, enhanced institutional accountability, digitalisation of environmental monitoring, and the development of economic and legal incentives («green»investments, environmental taxation, and climate reporting).