The “green” Imperative to Rehabilitate the Landresource Capacity for Ukraine’s Food Security

Abstract

The article is devoted to an innovative modern-day problem of rehabilitating the land resource capacity of Ukraine in the format of building up a public environmental strategy and its novel doctrine through the lens of the requirements of the global “green” course and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the European alliance. The research problem’s topicality arises from the need to align the process of rehabilitation of Ukraine’s natural resource capital with the priorities of the global climate and “green” agenda; to formulate a radically new paradigm of building up the public environmental policy in Ukraine on the principles of the European ideology of “green” transition and low-carbon development, with accounting for the technogenic-military impact of Russian armed aggression on the condition and quality of land resources; to elaborate innovative scenarios for “green” reconstruction, to ensure a sweeping modernization of Ukraine as a future member of the EU. The authors outlined the trajectory of environmental rehabilitation of Ukraine’s land resource capacity disrupted due to the technogenic-military impact of Russian armed aggression in the context of strategic directions of the Plan for post-war reconstruction of Ukraine by the European “green” scenario. The importance of the natural resource component, especially agricultural lands, as a strategic factor for national food security is shown. A vision of the environmental rehabilitation of agrarian capital compliant with the European Green Deal is given. It builds on the principles of ecosystem-based assessment, environmental reparation, and full compensation of the losses caused to Ukraine by the technogenic-military impact of Russian armed aggression, and on the best innovative practices of “green” modernization using internationally adopted “green” instruments, e.g., the procedure for restructuring external debts in exchange for nature protection assets. The authors proposed schemes to implement the land-resource-capacity-rehabilitation scenario as the basis for the national food security of Ukraine in the postwar period through amendments in the national environmental policy of Ukraine, to align it with European requirements, and to focus it on building up the nationwide ideology of social development and national security on the principles of “green” and “digital” transition.