The dissertation provides a comprehensive comparative description of the institute of legal responsibility for damage to the natural environment in the legislation of Ukraine and the European Union. It was emphasized that the main regularity of the development of environmental law in Ukraine today is to expand its sphere of action, to elaborate many legal requirements, and to create new objects of environmental law. The intolerable process of its development of environmental law in the context of independent Ukraine indicates that the expansion of the field of legal regulation is an objective process, the problem of substantial updating and improvement of environmental legislation is becoming acute. Legal liability for damage to the environment is a key aspect of improving legal regulation in the field of environmental legal relations.
The author substantiates the proposal to adopt the EU experience in determining the mechanism of legal response to cases of damage to the environment, based on which the requirement to develop a reasonable and proportional range of options for remedying the situation, including initial recovery and, if necessary, additional and compensatory restoration, evaluation of different options and selection of the most optimal based on the following criteria: the cost of implementation; degree of prevention of side effects; the benefits of each option; probability of success; time required for each of the options to recover damaged resources; degree of recovery; geographical connection with the damaged site if measures are taken elsewhere. At the same time, the previously established hierarchy of criteria for the choice of options is absent.
It is proved that the responsibility for damage to the environment should be considered as an independent form of legal responsibility because of the special nature of relations between the state and the entities that violated the norms of environmental law. These relations arise on the basis of legal facts, namely, legal acts that violate the requirements of environmental law and cause (or threaten to cause) harm to the environment, resulting in the coercive imposed on the offender, the effectiveness of which is ensured by the possibility of using the state machinery. At the same time, the damage is an integral part of this type of offense. It is determined that the specific feature of legal responsibility for damage to the environment is its complex nature - as an institute of environmental law, it combines the principles and norms of not only ecological but administrative, civil, labor, criminal law. In this case, a special feature is the possession of property liability.
The study reveals the functions of legal liability for damage to the environment. It is noted that in the mechanism of legal regulation this institute: 1) stimulates compliance with the principles and norms of environmental law; 2) warns of new violations in the field of environmental protection; 3) provide compensation for damage to the environment caused by illegal behavior; 4) creates a guarantee of the punishment of persons guilty of committing an unlawful act.
The author proposes to take as a basis of legal regulation the approach by which harm to the environment includes the costs of restoring, replacing or acquiring the equivalent, reducing the cost of natural resources between the time damage and renewal of the resource, as well as the reimbursement of reasonable costs to assess the damage. For resources that have objective economic value, their lost value is determined by the size of the decline in market prices. For resources that are not marketable, the relevant indicators are calculated using alternative methods. The damage to be compensated is the cost of restoring the natural object to which it was inflicted to its base state ("initial recovery"), as well as the cost of "compensatory recovery", which includes the cost of recovery or increase of resources , required to compensate for the temporary costs of the respective services.
