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Climate Change Mitigation
Published in Dalia Štreimikienė, Asta Mikalauskienė, Climate Change and Sustainable Development, 2021
Dalia Štreimikienė, Asta Mikalauskienė
The “polluter-pays” principle, which states that the polluter must pay for environmental damage, plays an important role in an environmental protection policy based on market instruments. If the cost of avoiding damage is lower than the cost of damage compensation, the polluter will avoid damaging the environment. In many cases, this principle is difficult to implement as the damage that is done cannot be compensated (e.g. climate change) or legal measures can no longer be applied to the polluters (e.g. if polluter companies no longer exist) and that is why external costs arise. Quantitative indication of external costs is a difficult task. The damage can be measured by a decrease in quality of life, which is calculated as the willingness to pay for maintaining or improving the quality of the environment. In a market economy, a Pigouvian tax, covering the external costs, may correspond to green taxes, which can reach 5%–10% of GDP. However, such taxes would be a heavy burden on business and would increase social costs. The industry’s response to increasing green taxes will be investments in technological innovation based on increases in raw materials’ and energy prices in the long term. Therefore, environmental economic instruments (such as green tax reform) should be introduced gradually, encouraging business for long-term technological changes. The external costs of energy production can be integrated into the price of energy, through the use of pollution taxes, emissions trading, and energy taxation, or integrated into an advanced cost–benefit analysis.
Ocean Rights: The Baltic Sea and World Ocean Health
Published in Cameron La Follette, Chris Maser, Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice, 2019
The Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area seeks to reduce land-based pollution and aims to protect and enhance the environment of the Baltic Sea, through ecosystem-based management and implementation of the Precautionary and Polluter-pays Principles. The Precautionary Principle states that whenever a significant amount of uncertainty exists, actions must be precautionary (‘when in doubt, err on the side of conservation’60). The Polluter-pays Principle requires that those who pollute and cause harm to the ecosystem must pay for the damage caused and subsequent restoration. It is therefore the contracting parties' obligation to implement the best available technology and environmental practices to reduce, prevent and eliminate pollution that not only harms human health but also the marine ecosystem and its living resources.61
Overview of Workshop Discussions
Published in Nicola Steen, Sustainable Development and the Energy Industries, 2017
However, environmental legislation has tended to have unanticipated results. Retrospective legislation has been passed in the US and has proved to be extremely problematic. Many countries have adopted the ‘polluter pays’ principle: this would suggest that where action is taken to clean up pollution the companies which created the problem should pay for the remedial action. However, in the US it is often the insurers who have had to pay. They have paid billions of dollars because of this legislation, put in place in the 1980s but covering actions before that time. The firms that insured industries had no idea of the risks they were taking when policies were sold in the 1960s and earlier. (Fogleman)
Drivers-pressures-state-impact-response framework of hazardous waste management in China
Published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 2022
Qudsia Kanwal, Xianlai Zeng, Jinhui Li
Under the current “polluter pays” principle, the economic penalty charged to the polluter may not fully cover the polluter’s environmental responsibilities. CFLS’s toxic site can be traced back to three chemical polluters, which were prosperous since the 1950s and discharged hazardous levels of toxins until they moved in 2010. Similarly, the Jingjiang’s hog farm toxic site incident also occurred because two polluters delivered their hidden toxic sites to another without effective remediation. Both failings occurred because current “polluter pays” principle losses in an integrated solid waste management approach (SI Table S9). In other words, the polluter simply fulfills their responsibility by paying the transporter or recycler and bears no responsibility for final disposal (Wang et al., 2016). Consequently, polluters prefer to pass their waste on to the cheapest recycler or dump their waste directly without considering environmental consequences. To solve this problem, the current “polluter pays” principle should be replaced with a “polluter charges” principle. The entire disposal process and its costs—both material and liability—are covered.
Inclusion of environmental impacts in life-cycle cost analysis of bridge structures
Published in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 2020
Zhujun Wang, David Y. Yang, Dan M. Frangopol, Weiliang Jin
Polluter pays principle [PPP, (Gaines, 1991)] suggests that the party who causes pollution is responsible for the corresponding treatment costs. According to this principle, the environmental costs of a bridge structure within the entire life-cycle are related to different groups. However, the environmental cost in this paper is an indicator used to evaluate the overall environmental performance of structures in monetary terms, rather than an accounting tool that identifies each party’s obligation to environment treatment. Hence, all the costs associated with environmental impacts of structures are counted as environmental costs. Moreover, as a part of indirect cost, environmental costs are borne by the public and society, rather than the project owners alone.
Mercury pollution in Colombia: challenges to reduce the use of mercury in artisanal and small-scale gold mining in the light of the Minamata Convention
Published in Water International, 2020
Farith A. Diaz, Lynn E. Katz, Desmond F. Lawler
The protection of human health, wildlife and natural environments demands a large amount of financial, technological and human resources that are only affordable to developed countries. In the United States, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as Superfund, was created for ‘cleaning up abandoned or uncontrolled contaminated sites that affect human health and the environment’ (USEPA, 2018b). Nevertheless, in the last decades, the annual appropriations to this programme, managed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), have been reduced from about US$2 billion to US$1.1 billion (GAO, 2015). In Canada, a Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan (FCSAP) was created to help provinces manage contaminated sites under their jurisdiction. This action plan started in 2005 and will run until 2020. It was estimated that, as of March 2013, the remaining environmental liability associated with federal contaminated sites was approximately US$10.6 billion (Story & Yalkin, 2014). Limitations in budget allocation to remediate contaminated sites seem to be critical even in developed countries such as Canada and the United States. These countries, with stronger economies and larger human and technological resources compared with countries such as Colombia, also face difficulties when allocating budgets for environmental protection. Both the United States and Canada apply the ‘polluter-pays’ principle to force corporations, private companies and individuals to provide financial compensation for environmental damage. This polluter-pays principle is more difficult to apply in artisanal and small-scale gold mining regions. Polluters are usually poor families or communities that use illegal or informal gold mining as their primary source of income. In other cases, the polluters are criminal organizations whose leaders are not easy to identify and are much less interested in paying compensation for destroying the environment.