The corresponding amendments to some laws were signed by the President of the Russian Federation. Thus, a chapter on eliminating accumulated environmental damage is being introduced into the Law on Environmental Protection, and additions are being made to a number of existing provisions of the law.
Let us recall that earlier, in 2010, following a meeting of the Presidium of the State Council of the Russian Federation, the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources was instructed to conduct an inventory and record of objects of accumulated environmental damage and develop a set of measures for its elimination, defining the mechanisms and volumes of financing for these measures, including “pilot” projects development of technologies for eliminating accumulated damage.
The first practical steps to assess and eliminate past environmental damage began in 2011 in areas most vulnerable from the point of view of anthropogenic impact (the islands of the Franz Josef Land archipelago, the islands of the Northern Novaya Zemlya archipelago, the territory of the Wrangel Island nature reserve and the village of Amderma in Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russian part of the island of Spitsbergen, Baikal natural territory).
In 2011, the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources was given instructions to prepare changes to the legislation of the Russian Federation aimed at improving the legal regulation of eliminating the consequences of negative impacts on the environment and compensating for environmental damage caused and accumulated as a result of past economic activities. At the same time, a draft Federal Law was developed, providing for the creation of legal, organizational and financial mechanisms for eliminating accumulated environmental damage. And now, 5 years later, having gone through numerous approvals, the version of the bill was signed by the President of the Russian Federation (Federal Law dated July 3, 2016 No. 254-FZ “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation”).
The Law defines the concepts of “accumulated environmental harm” and “objects of accumulated environmental harm.”
In accordance with the Law, constituent entities of the Russian Federation and local governments are given the right to identify and assess objects of accumulated environmental damage and organize work to eliminate accumulated environmental damage. In a number of cases established by the Government of the Russian Federation, these activities will be carried out by the federal executive body.
The law also establishes criteria for assessing objects of accumulated environmental harm (volume of pollutants, waste and their hazard classes; area of contaminated territory/water area; number of people living in the zone of negative impact of the object, etc.).
Accounting for objects of accumulated environmental harm will be carried out through their inclusion in the state register of objects of accumulated environmental harm. At the same time, in order to justify the priority of work to eliminate accumulated environmental damage and take urgent measures, the law provides for the categorization of objects of accumulated environmental damage.
To implement these provisions of the Law, it is envisaged to develop a resolution of the Government of the Russian Federation “On approval of the Procedure for maintaining the state register of objects of accumulated environmental harm”, which will disclose the procedures for making decisions on inclusion or “non-inclusion” of objects in the register, and determine the procedure for categorizing objects based on a score values of each of the criteria, procedures for updating information about the status of objects, etc. have been established.
The procedure for organizing work to eliminate accumulated environmental damage will be established by an act of the Government of the Russian Federation.
It is worth noting that the need to eliminate accumulated pollution is also established in the Main Directions of Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation and the Concept of Long-Term Social and Economic Development of the Russian Federation for the period until 2020, the Fundamentals of State Policy in the field of environmental development of the Russian Federation for the period until 2030, approved by the President of the Russian Federation 04/30/2012.
Agreements worth 507 million rubles have already been concluded to carry out work to eliminate past environmental damage. In 2016, the federal budget allocated 2 billion rubles for the implementation of new projects to eliminate accumulated pollution.
Also, Federal Law No. 254-FZ dated July 3, 2016 “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation” establishes:
transitional period of application of legislation on industrial and consumer waste for waste disposal facilities created in Crimea before its acceptance into the Russian Federation;
the possibility of creating biosphere polygons on part of the territory of state natural reserves in accordance with decisions of the Government of the Russian Federation;
the possibility of transferring the powers of federal executive authorities for federal state environmental supervision to executive authorities of constituent entities of the Russian Federation;
the authority of the Government of the Russian Federation to determine the organization performing the functions of the Bureau of Best Available Technologies.
According to the organizers of the exhibition-forum "ECOTECH"
HARM CAUSED TO THE ENVIRONMENT: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW?
Dictionary
Damage to the environment , - a negative change in the environment or individual components of the natural environment, natural or natural-anthropogenic objects that has a monetary value, expressed in their pollution, degradation, depletion, damage, destruction, illegal seizure and (or) other deterioration of their condition, as a result of harmful effects on the environment associated with violation of requirements in the field of environmental protection, other violation of the legislation of the Republic of Belarus.
Environmental harm - harm caused to the environment, as well as harm caused to the life, health and property of citizens, including individual entrepreneurs, property of legal entities and property owned by the state, as a result of harmful effects on the environment (Article 1 of the Law of the Republic of Belarus dated 11/26/1992 No. 1982-XII"On environmental protection").
■ Not subject to proof. The state body that established it during the implementation of state control in the field of environmental protection does not prove the fact of harm to the environment. However, the user of natural resources can present evidence to refute it.
State bodies exercising state control in the field of environmental protection do not require compensation for damage caused to the environment if the amount of compensation for such damage does not exceed three basic amounts (Article 101 Law no. 1982-XII).
■ Has no statute of limitations. The statute of limitations does not apply to claims for compensation for damage caused to the environment. However, claims made after three years from the date of establishment of the fact of harm are satisfied no more than three years preceding the filing of a claim for compensation for damage caused to the environment (clause 101 4 of Law No. 1982-XII).
■ Full refund. In accordance with Art. 933 of the Civil Code of the Republic of Belarus (hereinafter— Civil Code) and Art. 101 of the Law No. 1982-XII harm caused by offenses against environmental safety and the natural environment is subject to compensation in full by the person responsible for causing it.
In the event of harm caused by a person whose activities are associated with an increased danger to the environment, liability arises regardless of fault, unless the causer of harm proves that the harm arose due to force majeure. The owner of a source of increased danger may be released by the court from liability in whole or in part also on the grounds provided for in paragraph. 2 and 3 Art. 952 GK ( Art. 948 GK) .
Damage + Loss = Harm
According to Art. 1 of Law No. 1982-XII, harmful effects on the environment are understood as any direct or indirect impact on the environment of economic and other activities, the consequences of which lead to negative changes in the environment.
The components of harm are damage and loss.
In relation to the natural environment, the harm caused can be presented in the form of real and expected losses for it. Such losses are expressed in the form of damages and losses.
Damage — real losses in the natural environment (destruction of forests, wildlife, water depletion, decrease in soil fertility, etc.).
Losses — restoration costs disturbed state of the natural environment (lost income, environmental losses).
This material is published partially. The full material can be read in the journal “Ecology at the Enterprise” No. 7 (85), July 2018. Reproduction is possible only with
DAMAGE TO THE ENVIRONMENT ECOLOGICAL
ENVIRONMENTAL HARM - negative changes in the environment caused by anthropogenic activities as a result of the impact on it, environmental pollution. depletion of natural resources, destruction of ecosystems, creating a real threat to human health, flora and fauna.
Ecological dictionary, 2001
- AGE COMPOSITION OF THE POPULATION
- HARMFUL SUBSTANCE
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The problem of defining the concept of environmental harm, identifying its characteristic features and specific features currently has undoubted social and legal significance. Its social side is due to the critical state of the environment. There is no doubt that recently there has been a significant change in the social harmfulness of encroachments on public environmental relations, the nature of the harm caused by them has become more complex, and its objective manifestation has become more multifaceted. In some cases, the actual onset of negative consequences may occur after a sufficiently long time and on a completely different territory, which indicates its transboundary nature.
At the same time, in the theory of environmental law, the study of the concept of environmental harm pays unjustifiably little attention.
The need for in-depth theoretical development of the concepts of “environmental offense” and “environmental harm” was drawn attention to in the early 80s by the well-known scientist S.B. Baisalov. In the Kazakh legal literature, separate studies have appeared on the problems of legal liability for environmental offenses, which also highlight some aspects of compensation for environmental damage. At the same time, there is no single generally accepted definition of the concept of environmental harm to date.
Consideration of the issue of the concept of harm caused by violations of environmental legislation is closely related to the concept of the object of the corresponding offense, since in the most general form the object of the offense is precisely what is harmed as a result of the commission of an unlawful act.
The legal literature rightly emphasizes that there are no harmless offenses; every offense causes harm, since the object of the attack is social relations.
In this regard, it is necessary to briefly consider the positions of scientists on the issue of defining the concept of an object of environmental violation.
In some cases, the object of an environmental violation is understood as material and intangible benefits, namely natural objects and complexes, as well as the environment as a whole, protected by law from pollution, depletion and destruction, as well as human health and material assets, the condition of which depends on the quality of the environment environment, or the actual quality of the latter, in others - environmental interest. Based on the assertion about the inextricable existence of legally significant social relations and the legal norms governing them, some scientists include the norms of environmental and natural resource branches of legislation and the social relations regulated by them as elements of the object of an offense.
The statement of the stated positions allows us to conclude that in the science of environmental law there is no unified understanding of this legal category.
The most rational position seems to be those of those scientists who formulate the concept of the object of an environmental violation as a complex, integral set of social relations of an environmental nature.
Changed economic and socio-political conditions necessitate the expansion of this concept by including social relations that arise regarding the protection of subjective environmental rights (including property rights to natural resources).
Thus, the object of an environmental offense is a set of social relations regulated and protected by legal norms regarding the environment as a whole and its individual components, including relations of ownership and other proprietary rights to natural resources, management relations in the field of environmental management, relations in environmental protection from harmful influences, as well as relations to protect subjective environmental rights and legitimate interests of humans and citizens.
Experts in the field of environmental law note that harm to environmental relations when committing acts prohibited by environmental legal norms is caused, as a rule, by influencing the subject of these relations, and therefore there is a need to determine the relationship between the object and the subject of the environmental offense.
The subject of a social relationship is recognized as one or another phenomenon in relation to which this relationship arose and the cognitive and practical activities of its subjects are carried out. It is obvious that in the structure of an environmental relationship, an object is always material, since both the environment and its components always have a material shell.
The difference between the subject and the object of an environmental offense is that “not objects of the material world in themselves, but objects (things) as elements of social relations are protected by law, and an encroachment on them is an encroachment on the social relations associated with them.”
Consequently, natural objects and the environment as a whole act as material objects, in other words, objective carriers in which certain aspects and properties of environmental legal relations are manifested.
The range of natural objects - potential subjects of environmental torts, which are therefore taken under legal protection, is defined in Article 4 of the Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan “On Environmental Protection”. These can include: atmospheric air, water, soil, subsoil, flora and fauna, as well as climate in their interaction.
Natural objects, being an integral part of the environment, are characterized by the following necessary characteristics: 1) natural origin; 2) relationship with ecological systems.
It should be noted that the second of these signs is of decisive importance, since in order to classify illegal behavior as environmental it is necessary that at the time of its commission the subject of the illegal act was in a state of natural relationship with the environment.
It is necessary to show the relationship between the concepts “harm caused by environmental violations” and “environmental harm”.
Firstly, any encroachment on social relations protected by law means, first of all, harm to the legal order as such. Consequently, the commission of an environmental offense in all cases harms the environmental legal order as a whole, understood as a state of orderliness and organization of social relations, fixed and regulated by environmental legal norms. At the same time, in some cases, a violation of legal norms is accompanied by a violation of subjective rights, as well as a derogation of the actual subject of the offense - property and non-property benefits.
Therefore, in the legal literature, two types of harm are distinguished - socio-legal and actual, while attention is drawn to the possibility of harm in the socio-legal sense in cases where actual harm (violation of subjective rights, derogation of property or non-property benefits) is absent.
Thus, violation of social relations protected by environmental legal norms as a consequence of illegal behavior reveals the social nature of the harm caused to the object of an environmental violation. At the same time, in cases where the subject of an environmental violation is also directly negatively affected, the consequences of such behavior, by their physical nature, can be material in nature and expressed in damage or destruction of materialized objects.
Based on the research data, we can conclude that not every violation of legal environmental requirements entails actual harm to the environment, expressed in a deterioration in its qualitative condition or a decrease in quantitative characteristics.
Based on the above, we can propose the following classification of harm caused by environmental violations:
- 1) harm caused to the environmental legal order as a whole (its harm in the socio-legal sense);
- 2) harm in the actual sense, expressed in a real deterioration in the qualitative state of the environment or a decrease in its quantitative characteristics.
The actual harm caused by environmental violations is also heterogeneous in structure. Some violations of environmental legislation, such as illegal hunting of animals, birds, fish, illegal logging, etc., do not entail negative environmental consequences in terms of the quality of the environment and maintaining ecological balance, but cause property damage to the state as the owner of natural resources or to an individual user of natural resources.
Therefore, in order to classify such harm, it is necessary to take a closer look at the question of exactly what negative impacts on the environment have a pronounced environmental “coloring”.
Since environmental harm is considered not just as any, including minor, derogation of the quantitative characteristics of individual natural objects, but primarily as negative changes in the qualitative state of the environment as a whole, that is, what must be understood as environmental quality.
Environmental quality is characterized by a combination of the following criteria:
- 1. In biological terms, the criterion for the quality of the environment is its state that is favorable for human life and health. Taking into account the interrelation and interdependence of phenomena and processes in nature, man interacts with his natural habitat. Individual elements of nature are direct sources of satisfying the natural physiological needs of humans - breathing, quenching thirst, nutrition. This means that in the biological aspect, in order to preserve the conditions for the reproduction of humanity as such, the environment must first of all meet such a criterion as purity (non-pollution);
- 2. In the economic aspect, the quality of the environment must ensure the satisfaction of the material needs that increase as humanity develops (development of industry, agriculture, energy, transport, etc.). Therefore, economic indicators of a favorable state of the environment are resource intensity (inexhaustibility) and the productive capacity of natural resources.
- 3. In the social aspect, the quality of the environment must meet the aesthetic, recreational, scientific, and cultural needs of a person, since in the process of communicating with nature, a person satisfies not only physiological and material, but also spiritual needs. In this aspect, the quality of the environment must meet criteria such as species diversity and aesthetic richness.
- 4. In the structural and functional aspect, the environment must meet such criteria as environmental sustainability (balance of environmental components), preservation of natural ecological connections.
Thus, environmental quality indicators are:
- 1) cleanliness (non-pollution) of the environment;
- 2) resource intensity (inexhaustibility) and productive capacity of natural resources;
- 3) species diversity and aesthetic richness;
- 4) environmental sustainability and preservation of natural ecological connections.
It follows from this that the structure of environmental damage caused to the environment contains either socio-cultural, economic, or biological aspects. Various combinations of them are also possible. The appearance of structural and functional disturbances of natural ecological connections, leading to loss of ecological balance, depends on the degree of severity of the economic and (or) biological aspects.
It should be emphasized that any of the above aspects of environmental harm is necessarily accompanied by negative material consequences for society as a whole or an individual user of natural resources, manifested in losses of previously invested costs for the reproduction and improvement of natural objects, forced expenses for its restoration, and lost income. Therefore, I completely share the opinion of A. Khadzhiev, who argues that causing environmental harm is inevitably accompanied by negative economic consequences. However, I cannot support his further conclusion that economic harm caused to nature cannot but lead to environmentally damaging consequences.
For example, in assessing the harm caused by the illegal exclusion of animals, birds, and fish from the natural environment, there are no environmental criteria. Since the illegality of such actions lies only in the lack of appropriate permission, there is no reason to talk about the occurrence of any negative environmental consequences in this case.
Therefore, in cases where the presence of actual harm, expressed in the derogation of the quantitative characteristics of natural resources, does not lead to their depletion or other negative environmental consequences, we should speak of causing property damage to the state or the user of natural resources.
The same position is taken by D.L. Baideldinov, who proposes to consider economic and environmental harm as independent types of harm caused to nature. He writes: “There is a classification of harm divided into environmental and economic harm to nature. Economic harm affects the property interests of natural resource users and can be expressed materially. Restoration of such damage is carried out in accordance with the general principles of civil liability. Environmental damage affects the very state of nature... Restoring environmental damage is possible not through monetary payments, but by carrying out work to restore the natural object in kind.”
Thus, environmental harm should be understood as a deterioration in the qualitative state of the environment caused by a violation of environmental protection legislation, or such a decrease in its quantitative characteristics that can cause negative environmental consequences, as well as any associated derogation of a material and intangible benefit protected by law, including human life and health.
The absence of a direct indication of harm to individual natural objects is explained by the fact that the negative impact on any individual component of the environment inevitably affects its condition as a whole. Thus, harm caused to a natural object appears as a manifestation of harm to the environment.
Environmental damage has a pronounced specificity.
Firstly, negative anthropogenic impact often causes not only direct damage caused to a specific natural object, but also harm caused to other objects interconnected with it or the environment as a whole, expressed in the loss of ecological connections of the damaged or destroyed object with the entire natural system.
From a natural science point of view, any artificial change in the environment inevitably leads to the development of natural chain reactions aimed at neutralizing the change or the formation of new natural systems, the formation of which, with significant changes in the environment, can become irreversible.
Secondly, not all harmful effects appear immediately; many of them are potential.
Thirdly, an essential feature of environmental damage is that its economic assessment must be preceded by a determination of the physical volume of the consequences of negative anthropogenic impact. Therefore, only those negative changes that can be identified and measured in accordance with the scientific and technical capabilities existing at a given stage of social development can be recognized as environmental harm.
Fourthly, environmental harm has specific forms of manifestation, which will be discussed in detail below.
So, to argue that the main damage to the environment is caused by illegal behavior means contradicting the actual state of affairs. Many scientists reasonably believe that her current critical condition is the result of massive exposure to lawful behavior.