Assessment of the safety of environment in terms of sustainable development
The article reveals the main ecological and natural and technogenic prerequisites for the formation of adverse environmental conditions in today’s Ukraine. The authors consider the functional dimension of modern threats to sustainable development and propose a classification depending on their origin, including classic and synergistic threats, transformations of human consciousness as well as social, ecological and economic imbalances. It has been found that the main problems of institutional ensuring of the environmental protection in Ukraine are primarily caused property transformation, economic relations, restructuring of the mechanisms relating to the functioning of industrial enterprises, which is aggravated by the difficult social and economic situation in the regions. The study is devoted to the development of conceptual bases, principles and scenarios of modelling of environmental safety in the system of sustainable development. It considers artificiality, structural instability, quantifiability and duality of environmental safety. Factor and time components of safety determined according to the modified stochastic approach are also disclosed. They interpret the dependence of the environmental competitiveness of the region with regard to environmental hazard (component by component), innovation and investment activity aimed at improving the state of the environment. The authors of the paper argue that safety modelling, in view of institutional transformations (or responses), characterises the level of response to challenges, taking into account the analysis of environmental safety issues in terms of sustainable development, the state of legal mechanisms, the struggle against threats and risks, etc. In the light of the aforementioned, the authors of the article have developed an econometric model of the period and change in the dependence of the ecological competitiveness of the territory with regard to environmental hazard, innovation and investment activities aimed at improving the state of the environment. The obtained results, based on the modified stochastic approach using real information that quantitatively reflects the features of such processes, have prove a significant impact of genetic factors on the competitiveness of Ukraine.