• What is Environmental law?
Environmental law is the collection of laws, regulations, agreements and common law that governs how humans interact with their environment. The purpose of environmental law is to protect the environment and create rules for how people can use natural resources. Environmental laws not only aim to protect the environment from harm, but they also determine who can use natural resources and on what terms. Laws may regulate pollution, the use of natural resources, forest protection, mineral harvesting and animal and fish populations.
• Early Environmental Laws
Lawmakers began to pass environmental laws in the twentieth century. The environmental movement began to pick up pace in the 1960s with the majority of environmental laws and regulations being created since that time.
Early environmental laws didn’t focus on protecting the environment as a whole. They also didn’t give standing for a person to sue a polluter if they weren’t personally harmed by the other person’s actions.
• What do Environmental Law Regulate?
Environmental laws cover a wide range of topics including the following:
Air Quality – Air quality laws protect the air from pollution and may include measures to protect the air from things like ozone depletion.
Water Quality – Environmental laws may protect water from pollution. They may also determine who can use water and how to handle potential problems like treating waste water and managing surface run off.
Waste Management – Municipal waste, hazardous substances and nuclear waste all fall in the category of waste management.
Contaminant Cleanup – Not all environmental law focuses on preventing pollution. Contaminant cleanup deals with addressing pollution after it happens. Laws may include protocols for cleanup as well as civil and criminal punishment for polluters.
Chemical Safety – Chemical safety regulations manage things like pesticide use and chemicals in products like plastic bottles.
Hunting and fishing – Environmental laws may regulate and protect wildlife populations. Lawmakers determine who can hunt and fish and how these activities are regulated.
• What Does Environmental Law Cover?
There are many areas under the umbrella of environmental law. All have one thing in common – the protection of ecology and the health of the environment.
Pollution
Air Pollution and Quality: This is the enforcement of air standards through monitoring that determines what constitutes safe levels of certain substances emitted by industrial processes, motor vehicles, and part of our everyday lives. There are laws for the outside and indoor environments to ensure safe working levels. They are designed to protect human and ecological health. Some are concerned with placing limitations on emissions (as some countries now include emissions tests for annual vehicle safety checks) while others are enacted to eliminate it altogether. One of the best examples of control or elimination is the global legislation in the 1980s to limit CFC emissions that were damaging the ozone layer. There may also be requirements on what technologies must be used for mitigation such as the use of catalytic converters in cars that used older lead fuel.
Contaminant Cleanup, Prevention and Mitigation: Toxic spills and leaks happen even with all the best intentions in the world. While some are the result of negligence, some are unavoidable. Regardless of whether such a pollutant leak is avoidable or unavoidable, there are necessary laws determining what is required of the responsible party and the team responsible for the cleanup should do to ensure that contamination is first limited and controlled, and then removed from an environment to avoid longer-term or large-scale damage. Regulations can also include liability, response, determine the process of investigation, monitoring before, during and after cleanup, and the risk assessment of long-term effects.
Safe Use of Chemicals: The safe use of chemicals is required in any workplace where they are used: from industrial manufacturing to agriculture, testing laboratories, professional cleaning, repair garages, such chemical safety laws seek to govern how we use them. This means the corrects storage of chemicals, their use, safety equipment in their application, the types of storage containers and even how (and who) they are bought and sold such as licenses, to registered businesses and so on. This seeks to manage and control by limiting risk and ensuring safety, the actual chemicals and substances where they are necessary. Environmental law has also banned some chemicals where their risks outweigh the benefits. A good example of this is the removal of Bisphenol A from plastic bottles in some states.
Waste Management: Waste is a fact of life. Our homes, industry, and commerce all produce waste; it cannot be avoided. Waste management concerns the governance of many aspects of waste from their transport and storage, proper procedure on disposal and treatment where necessary, everything from the recyclable packaging of our household waste right up to nuclear waste as a byproduct of energy production. Some of these are damaging to the environment or human health – or both – while some are not harmful but take too long so long to break down that they go into a landfill. Waste management is as much about reducing the amount of raw material in a landfill as it is about protecting health.
Sustainability of Resources
As well as prevention, treatment and mitigation of the above resources, there is increasingly a need for laws concerning sustainability. This is defined as the ability or desire to sustain a resource at a certain level and based on three scientific principles: increased dependence on renewable energy, biodiversity, and chemical cycling. Typically, it involved interventions to place limits on use or to enforce standards of replacement. It covers the following areas.
Forestry and landscape sustainability: Forestry and landscape represent some of the oldest environmental protection laws in the world. They can cover anything from a proper procedure on land clearance – not just forbidding it but also controlled burning policy. Government take on responsibility for enforcing the law, setting punishments, and mitigating problems.
Impact assessment and monitoring: Environmental impact assessments examine the potential consequences under specific scenarios of the results of an action. This can and does include the wider ecological effects of construction and development or increased industrial output, but it can also include the potential positives such as how land might recover from environmental problems or what the long-term ecological effects will be of reforesting with a certain type of tree canopy.
Mineral resource sustainability: Minerals are precious metals, sold and liquid fossil fuels such as oil and coal, are resources that require licensing and protection for proper management. These are finite resources and as they exist on government land, businesses wishing to operate them must seek license.
Water resource sustainability: Water is a renewable resource but when handled poorly, can lead to shortages. Specifically, water resource sustainability refers to the process of harnessing and using it, in areas where drought is likely, managing it for minimal wastage. As water and water runoff does not respect political boundaries, international laws on conservation and use are common and applied, especially where there is shared use and responsibility or competing claims to it. Laws here apply to surface water such as rivers, lakes and oceans, floodwater and ice meltwater, groundwater and the water table.
Wildlife and fishery sustainability: Laws protecting wildlife seek to control and limit the impact of human activity on animal species and by extension, prevent an imbalance of natural food chains. There are also laws to protect botanical species, particularly those vital to a local ecology or those that are endangered or threatened, or otherwise considering scientifically important.
• Environmental Law in Iran
As said in the Constitution law of Iran, “in the Islamic Republic of Iran, protecting the environment that this generation and the next would live and have a social life in, is a public duty. Therefor any economical or non economical activity that does any Irrecoverable harm or pollutes the environment is banned.”
But nowadays with the increase of concerns about environment in the world, every country has a particular organization to protect it’s environment. In Iran, the Environment Protection Organization is on this duty. With all of the endeavors of this organization, there are still lots of environmental problems in this country and in some cases like the Climate there has been some Irrecoverable damages to the environment.
lack of legislation about environment is the main cause of these irrecoverable problems.
