The Interconnection of Civil and Environmental Laws in the Compensation of Damage to the Environment

The aim of this article is to identify the possibility of transferring civil law provisions on tort liability to relations for compensation for environmental damage. To achieve this aim, the author analysed the norms of civil and environmental laws and judicial practice by using system analysis and synthesis, comparative, and formal legal research methods. The article explores the scientific points of view of environmental lawyers on the possibility of applying tort law obligations to environmental liability. The author shares the view that damage caused to the environment is significantly different from that caused to objects of civil circulation. Not only material, but also environmental losses, which are determined on the basis of appropriate rates and techniques, must be considered, as well as the costs of remediation measures. This is the case of increased property liability for environmental damage. Based on this, the author concludes that it is necessary to fix the corresponding norm on this responsibility in the Federal Law "On Environmental Protection". At the same time, the author concludes that the main provisions on civil-law tort obligations, as the analysis of law enforcement practice has shown, can be transferred to the sphere of obligations from causing damage to the environment. However, laws on environmental protection in terms of provisions on compensation for environmental damage should take precedence over provisions of civil law on non-contractual obligations. On the example of the correlation of environmental and civil liability for damage, the author concludes that, at the level of legislation, the theory of environmental legal responsibility, which includes property, administrative, disciplinary, criminal liability, is deprived of perspectives. Moreover, the author shares the position of the famous environmental lawyer S.A. Bogolyubov, who rightly notes that well-known legal means of influence are used in the environmental sphere, and the nature of legal sanctions does not have significant qualitative differences conceptually dissociating the methods of coercion into an independent form of legal responsibility in the field of ecology, which adds little to its usefulness, which has sufficient signs of relative "sovereignty".

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