Environmental Constraints to Ensuring the Resilience of the Population's Quality of Life in the Regions of Ukraine under External Threats

Abstract

The article substantiates the set of environmental constraints on ensuring the resilience of the population's quality of life in the regions of Ukraine that have emerged under the influence of external threats. The dual nature of the environmental component is revealed: at the level of quantitative assessment, it appears as an independent component with its own system of indicators, while in the conceptual dimension it serves as a basic factor of systemic resilience that integrates the economic, social, demographic and institutional dimensions. Applying an integral approach that aggregates partial indicators of the state of the atmospheric, aquatic and terrestrial environment and of the waste sector, an assessment of the environmental component was carried out and four typological groups of regions were identified. It is established that the integral index reflects the consequence rather than the cause of deterioration, since regions with similar index values are affected by constraints of different origin. A classification of environmental constraints into five types is proposed: resource-reproductive, assimilative, safety-related, infrastructural-technological and institutional-regulatory. They are differentiated by their substantive feature, the time horizon required for their elimination and the degree of controllability by the instruments of regional policy. An asymmetry between the controllability of constraints and the speed of return on management intervention is revealed, which is significant for the allocation of budgetary resources. It is proved that institutional-regulatory constraints are cross-cutting and determine the feasibility of measures in all other areas. The inadmissibility of unified target indicators of environmental policy under conditions of spatial heterogeneity of accumulated pressure is argued.