An Assessment of the Environmental-Economic Development of Urbanized Areas in Ukraine

Abstract

The effective organic development of urbanized areas is a component determining high quality of the population’s life and related activities. The ongoing change in the environmental performance necessitates the making of a new roadmap for transformation and urbanization with consideration to tendencies and patterns of environmental phenomena. An overall assessment of the environmental-economic performance in urbanized areas is a rather complicated issue as it covers many dimensions that cannot be determined by one indicator. It is, therefore, obvious that it should be a set of indicators measuring the relationship between the phenomena occurring due to the environmental change. The main indicators of environmental friendliness of urbanized areas include ambient air quality, generation and treatment of waste of all the hazard categories, and wastewater treatment. Analysis of the structure and dynamics of these indicators as the main indicators of the environmental performance of urbanized areas is, therefore, critically important.  The article’s objective is to determine a set of indicators of the environmental friendliness of cities, explore their relationship, analyze and evaluate the mode of factor effects for the phenomena. The existing estimates of socio-economic development of cities do not provide the complete coverage of environmental indicators or do not include them at all. This, in particular, refers to the methods for assessment of territorial development in Ukraine (monitoring of regional development indicators). All the calculations required for the analysis were made using STATISTICA software, “Principal components” method, “Factor analysis” module. The graphic criterion “Screeplot” was used to visualize identification of the components. Using the Kaiser rule (eigenvalue (λj>1) allowed to identify three principal components attributable to 86.6% of the emissions of pollutants generated by stationary sources in urbanized areas of Ukraine. As shown by the research results, the heaviest polluters among the urbanized areas in 2020 were the cities of Dnipro with 31,100tons and Kyiv with 25,500tons. The analyzed tendencies give evidence of a positive move towards improvement in the air basin in the urbanized areas, although the problem of setting pollution margins required for environmental assessment for purposes of international comparisons is yet to be solved. As the environment preservation has become a challenge of today, issues of waste generation and treatment need to be assigned priority status in creating long-term, medium-term and short-term programs for development of urbanized areas.