Liability For Environmental Damage Research Articles

Environmental liability for contaminated land — towards a European consensus

Land contamination 1 1 Contaminated land is any land which appears to the local authority in whose area it is situated to be causing or threatening to cause significant harm due to substances in, on, or under it and land causing or threatening to cause pollution of controlled waters due to substances in, on, or under it (S.78A (2) Environmental Protection Act 1990, inserted by S.57 Environment Act 1995). has often been accepted as an inevitable consequence of industrialisation (Williams, R., 1995, Paper presented to the 9th AESOP Congress), however, when land is contaminated this affects the market value of the site and presents problems in terms of the extent of civil liability for environmental damage and clean up. Different countries have different approaches to dealing with contaminated land, with no consensus approach across Europe. There is now increasing pressure being brought to bear on European member states to treat contamination with some degree of uniformity. This paper explores a number of differences in contaminated land policy together with the legal and policy developments at national and European levels and concludes that a European consensus on land contamination is very problematic but nevertheless important for long term land development across Europe.

Recent UK legal developments relating to pollution of water resources

Abstract The new UK statutory contaminated land provisions are expected to come into effect in 1997. Land will be contaminated for the purposes of the legislation if the presence of substances in, on or under it mean that significant harm is being caused or there is a possibility of such harm being caused or pollution of controlled waters is being caused or is likely to be caused. In a separate legal development, powers contained in the Water Resources Act 1991 for dealing with water pollution are also being strengthened. There is some concern that there is potential for overlap or conflict between these two regimes. Developments at EU level include a communication of European Community water policy. It is expected to lead to a framework directive on water resources. The European Commission is shortly expected to take some action on the issue of liability for Environmental Damage.

Liability for oil spill damages: Issues, methods, and examples

Liability is an important incentive‐based instrument for preventing oil spills and provides a sustainable approach for restoring coastal resources injured by spills. However, the use of liability for environmental damages raises many challenges, including quantification of money measures of damages. In this article, case studies are used to illustrate the issues, methods, and challenges associated with assessing a range of damages, from those that can be measured relatively easily using market information to more “esoteric,”; and much more difficult, cases involving non‐market‐valued losses. Also discussed are issues raised by the new national and international regulatory focus on restoration and by the simplified, compensatory formula used by some states.

Liability for Environmental Damage in Antarctica

Liability for Environmental Damage in Antarctica

Liability for Contaminated Land: Lessons From the Dutch Experience

Civil liability for environmental damage is currently very much the centre of attention. Many countries and international organizations have recently adopted rules in this field or are in the process of doing so. Almost without exception, these rules concentrate on creating a liability regime for damage caused by pollution that is the result of incidents which took place before their entry into force. The problem of damage that is the result of so-called historic pollution — primarily cases of soil contamination — was mostly left outside the range of these regulations. Until recently that is. Last year specific legislation on liability in cases of historic soil contamination was adopted in the Flemish region of Belgium and in the United Kingdom. Other countries like, for example, Denmark are studying the subject. The Netherlands has much greater experience with this type of legislation. It goes back to the Interim Soil Clean-up Act of 1983. The experiences with this act are reflected in a new legal regime for cleaning up contaminated land that came into force in 1994. The objective of this article is to reflect on these Dutch experiences.

Economic aspects of environmental liability: an introduction

The present article forms an introduction to those that follow. It sets the law relating to civil liability for environmental damage in the context of economic theory, and examines, inter alia, whether fault liability or strict liability is the better instrument for ensuring that environmental damage is minimised and whether the liability of individual industrial operators is best covered by insurance or whether specialist compensation funds are a more effective option.

Erratum

Previous articleNext article No AccessErratumPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 90, Number 1Jan., 1995 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/367451 Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1995 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ruth Plato-Shinar, Marcia Gelpe Lenders' liability for environmental damages in the absence of statutory regulation – lessons from the Israeli model: part 2, Law and Financial Markets Review 5, no.66 (Nov 2015): 458–466.https://doi.org/10.5235/175214411798411112

Pollutant source identification and allocation: Advances in hydrocarbon fingerprinting

AbstractOften liability for environmental damage and cleanup of contaminated sites is made difficult, especially with chemically complex environments containing different pollutants, by the inability to differentiate potential sources (or “owners”) of pollutants from each other. As a result, unnecessary costs may be associated with having to assume financial responsibility for alleged contamination of a site. This article reviews the advances in chemical fingerprinting as a tool in identifying and differentiating sources of hydrocarbon pollutants in chemically complex environments. Appropriate hydrocarbon target analytes and required analytical methods for hydrocarbon fingerprinting are discussed, and new interpretative tools are presented that may be applied to contaminated soil, sediment, and groundwater environmental situations. With these analytical and interpretative techniques, an appropriate allocation of chemical contamination and costs at a site can be made.

Liability for Transboundary Environmental Damage Towards a General Liability Regime?

Since 1980, the International Law Commission (ILQ has been engaged in drafting a comprehensive convention on liability for damage arising out of acts not prohibited by international law. During its work, the TLC has increasingly focused on transboundary environmental damage. Thus, the project may have considerable impact on the further development of this area of international law. This article analyzes the bask concepts of the project which have emerged so far. It assesses the political feasibility of the project in the light of the current state of international law concerning liability for environmental damage, given that a number of specific ultra-hazardous activities are already regulated by multilateral liability regimes. It concludes tfa»> the international community has increasingly accepted the obligation to regulate liability issues, which has improved the chances for victims to mount successful claims. However, this does not mean that states were prepared to compensate for transboundary environmental damage.

Strict Liability for Environmental Damage: The Cambridge Water Company case

Strict Liability for Environmental Damage: The Cambridge Water Company case

Civil Liability for Environmental Damage: The Green Shoots of a Community Policy

Civil Liability for Environmental Damage: The Green Shoots of a Community Policy

Liability for Environmental Damage in Antarctica

Liability for Environmental Damage in Antarctica

Adding an Economic Dimension to Risk Assessment: Discussion

Government policy choice requires comparison of the costs and benefits of alternative actions. Difficulties arise from uncertainty about the consequences of candidate policies and the need to compare outcomes that differ on both economic and health dimensions. Economics can improve risk assessment and policy choice by providing methods for (a) identification and analysis of the scientific uncertainties that are critical to government policy selection, (b) analyzing market interactions that affect exposure to the hazards in question, and (c) valuing health effects and other potential consequences. In food supply, as in other domains, the link from government policy to health and economic outcomes is mediated by market interactions. Risk assessment (of chemicals, microorganisms, and other agents) considers the links from policy to human exposure to health consequences. The link from exposure to health effects is characterized by a physiological dose response function; that from policy to exposure depends on economic interactions. Conditional on government regulations, food producers decide what foods to produce and technologies to employ; consumers decide what foods to consume. These decisions lead to supply and demand functions, which jointly determine the quantities of each food consumed. The quantities and their distribution in turn determine consumer exposure to foods and associated agents, and worker or environmental exposure to agents associated with production. Supply and demand decisions can be affected by information about the benefits and costs associated with consumption or production. From a producer's perspective, one of the costs of a new production technology is the possibility of liability for unintended damage to consumer or worker health or to the environment. Fleisher analyzes producers' possible liability for environmental damage associated with the use of production technologies involving genetically engineered microorganisms (GEMs). Because GEMs are perceived to represent a low-probability/high-consequence risk, estimating future liability is particularly difficult. Individuals frequently have difficulty in evaluating small risks, choosing either to ignore them or to overvalue a reduction to the apparent certainty of no risk from the source (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky). In a new legal area, producers must consider the possibility of retroactive liability: even if all reasonable precautions are taken, GEM users may find themselves liable in the future. To the extent that identification of the producer whose GEMs caused any damage is difficult, however, individual producers may escape liability unless something like the market-share liability doctrine applied to asbestos-linked worker injury is applied. Economics can also provide a method for valuing diverse policy outcomes. Policy choice frequently involves risk-cost tradeoffs when improved health can be obtained at additional cost. Risk-risk tradeoffs may also be important; e.g., possibly carcinogenic preservatives may reduce the incidence of acute illess from foodborne pathogens, at the cost of increased cancer in the future. Candidate policies are most readily compared if the differences in outcomes on all relevant dimensions can be made commensurate, as by valuing them in monetary units. Roberts presents a simple rule for estimating the cost of illness from foodborne pathogens. The cost is assumed to be a linear function of severity, measured by the proportion of cases that prove fatal. The specific formula she presents requires validation using information on additional pathogens, but the approach is promising. Methods requiring only limited data can be valuable because the number of hazards that must be evaluated overwhelms current methods; e.g., two-thirds of pesticide James K. Hammitt is a mathematician with the Rand Corporation.

Environmental Damage Liability: Need for Legal Instruments

Environmental Damage Liability: Need for Legal Instruments