The Insufficiency And Perfection Of The Response Legal System For Sudden Water Pollution Incident

On April 11 st,2014, a sudden water pollution incident made Lanzhou, Gansu Province become the focus of the country. Located in the upstream of the Yellow River, with a population of 3 Million, this important industrial city was severely effected on the industrial production and the daily life of its citizens. Recent years, such sudden water pollution incidents are on a higher risk, which not only brings immeasurable damages to the ecological environment, but also poses a threat on people’s life, health and property, even becomes a factor of social instability. The response legal system for sudden water pollution incident starts lately in our country and the development is lagging behind, comparing with other environment protection legal system. This makes the problem happen frequently during the practice in dealing with the sudden water pollution incidents. As the sustainable development is more and more deeply rooted in people’s mind and the Party and State promoted ecological civilization construction as a national macro strategy, the voice for perfecting the sudden water pollution incident response legal system from different social sectors becomes stronger and stronger under such background. Thus, it is very necessary to think about the deficiencies of the sudden water pollution response legal system and put forward related consummate suggestions.Besides introduction and conclusion, this paper consists of three parts.The first part is that with Lanzhou water pollution incident as the starting point which briefly combs the development process, and summarizes the analysis of focus events reflected from the legal perspective, that is, lack of supervision, lag of information disclosure, lack of public participation, difficult of accountable and remedy, weakness of emergency safeguard.The second part is to focus on the problems above. From the prominent problems existing in legislation and practice as well as four dimensions of prevention, disposal, remedy, safeguard, this part points out the problems in China’s legal system to cope with sudden water pollution incident: The first one is that the preventive system is not perfect, which reflected in that the monitoring and warning system is backward, and the emergency plan system is not complete; the second is that the emergency disposal system is not perfect. Because of the disclosure of emergency information is lag behind and the lack of public participation, the effective of emergency disposal is affected severely; the third is that the remedy system is deficiency. Because of lacking accountability, evaluation, compensation system, it caused difficulty to make up for the loss generated in the emergency water pollution incident; Fourth, safeguard system is weak. The concrete manifestation is that the insufficiency of emergency material, the unreasonable management of emergency fund and shortage of emergency human resources with low degree of specialization.The third part is that on the basis of analysis above, combining the reality of our country and drawing on the advanced experience of developed countries such as Japan and USA, it puts forward specific measures and recommendations to improve: firstly, perfect the preventive system. Through improving the monitoring, warning system and emergency plan system; hold the first defense line to deal with the sudden water pollution incident; secondly, improve the emergency disposal system. Based on the high-efficiency information disclosure system and expanding public participation, enhance the efficiency of emergency disposal; thirdly, improve the remedy system. By strengthening the accountability system, constructing the development of loss evaluation system and promoting environmental pollution liability insurance system scientifically, improve the remedy system. Fourthly, strengthen the construction of safeguard system. Take effective measures to handle the weak links such as the emergency supplies, emergency funds and emergency human resources, and these measures will provide strong safeguard to deal with water pollution incident. Through the above proposals, I hope to provide reference for the improvement of China’s response legal system for sudden water pollution incident.