Study On Compensation For Transboundary Environmental Damages

The development of transboundary environmental damage issues in international law have been in the history of hundreds of years.The research on the definition of key concepts like the state responsibility,the precautionary principle and the principle of damage distribution are frequently studied and reached a consensus by scholars.The issue of compensation for environmental damage was listed in the agenda of the work of the International Law Commission in 1978.Afterwards,the legal system related to compensation has made considerable progress.The responsible body and the principle of liability for transboundary damage in transboundary environmental damage compensation have basically been reached a consensus,but the calculation and compensation of environmental damage has not been resolved yet.For environmental damage compensation,international practice mostly compensates for damages caused by the environment itself,and there are very few practices for compensation for the accompanying damage to ecosystems,without mentioning the method of assessing environmental damage associated with it.The International Court of Justice judgment of certain activities in Nicaragua in the border area in 2010 promoted the development of a system of compensation for transboundary environmental damage,in which the environmental goods and services that the ecosystem could provide are compensated.The above ICJ judgment is a new breakthrough of traditional environmental damages,including personal,property and environmental restoration costs.The paper studied on transboundary environmental damage compensation mainly includes the following four parts:The first part is an overview of the transboundary environmental damage compensation.This section focuses on the definition of transboundary environmental damages,the historical evolution of transboundary environmental damages and the latest practice of the International Court of Justice(Certain Activities carried out by Nicaragua in the Border Area(Costa Rica v.Nicaragua)).The second part discusses the scope of compensation for transboundary environmental damages.This section mainly discusses the compensable scope of environmental damage on the basis of in-depth analysis compensations in Certain Activities carried out by Nicaragua in the Border Area case,which reaches the conclusion that scope of compensation fortransboundary environmental damages should not include environmental damage incurred but also expected environment services value,in addition,twice costs and expenses of monitoring the illegal activities carried out by Nicaragua and the costs and expenses of damage relief for the construction of the dam constructed for avoiding expanding the environmental damages.The third part is the identification of causality of transboundary environmental damage.This part mainly studies the causal relationship between environmental damage and the expected environment services value,the causality determination of monitoring costs and expenses,and the causality determination of the costs and expenses of prejudice remedy of Certain Activities carried out by Nicaragua in the Border Area case.The fourth part discusses assessment methods of transboundary environmental damage.The assessment methods include the ecosystem services approach,replacement cost method,benefit transfer method and overall assessment methods,these methods are mentioned in Certain Activities carried out by Nicaragua in the Border Area case.The above assessment methods are proposed by both parties to the disputes in certain activities in the border area of Nicaragua or proposed by the International Court of Justice.Through in-depth analysis of the new developments and new features of the environmental damage compensation case first tried by the International Court of Justice,this paper hopes to provide some ideas for China’s improvement of the ecological monitoring system,the position when dealing with disputed regional issues,and the technical skills of strengthening diplomatic work.