Research On Legal Issues Of Legislation And Practice In Natural Heritage Protection

So far, the humanity has gone through more than 2 million years of history, after numerous huge changes, the nature has left many precious natural heritages for the mankind and their future generations. Natural heritage is the common heritage for all mankind, the protection of natural heritage is not only the important responsibility of every country, but also the common obligation of all mankind. Humanity has entered the 21st century, it is the common concept of all mankind to make use natural resources sustainably, and develop and use natural heritage reasonably.However, the protection and development of natural heritage is always a pair of irreconcilable contradictions. Currently, the statues of the natural heritage protection in the world is not optimistic, lots of natural heritage are at the brink of extinction. On one hand, the current defect of international and national legislation is not able to provide effective basis for the natural heritage protection. On the other hand, various destruction of natural heritage in the practice has brought many difficulties for the protection.Hence, this thesis attempt to analyze the faced difficulties of natural heritage protection and propose related countermeasures from the perspective of legislation and practice. In this thesis, the methods of comparative studies, case studies, management science studies, legal economic studies will be used to analyze the issues in legislation and practice of natural heritage protection. The thesis is divided into five chapters, totaling 140,000 Chinese characters approximately. In logically, chapterâ… is the definition about the natural heritage and related concepts, chapterâ…¡and chapterâ…¢is mainly focused on the problems in the natural heritage legislation, chapterâ…£analyzes the difficulties faced in the practice of natural heritage protection, and chapterâ…¤is concerning on the current status and problems of natural heritage protection legislation in China, and attempt to bring out improving measures.Chapterâ… is divided into four sections. The first section is the definition on the natural heritage and its connotation and extension in order to clear the scope of the study. The second section introduced the manifestations of natural heritage from the vertical and horizontal levels. The third section mainly analyzed the features and its scientific, ecological, aesthetic and economic value of the natural heritage. And the fourth section compares the natural heritage with similar concepts, such as cultural heritage, cultural relic, natural resource about their relationship and distinction.The second chapter is divided into three sections. The first section introduced the current legal documents about natural heritage protection from the perspective of international conventions and soft law. It focused on the background and main contents of Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which viewed as a constitutional document of natural heritage protection. The second section introduced the legal documents of natural heritage protection in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and special areas. The third section focused on the existing problems of the application of Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, including the standard of the definition on natural heritage, the limitation of sovereignty in convention application, the management of World Heritage Fund, the conflicts between the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and other conventions, and the application of List of World Heritage in Danger. As the programmatic document, Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage plays an exemplary role in the draft of international and regional conventions and plays a guiding role in the legislation of member states. Therefore, the effective application of Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage is the basic and premise of the international legal protection of natural heritage.The chapter III is divided into three sections. The chapter mainly introduced the profiles and experience of natural heritage legislation in the major countries of the world, and analyzed the shortcomings of domestic legislation and evaluated the new trends in domestic legislation of every country. The first section introduced the status and experience of natural heritage protection legislation in the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy and South Korea. The second section analyzed the shortcoming of current domestic legislation from five aspects, such as the pluralism of legislative subject, the conflicts of central and local legislation, the plight of legislative model, incomprehensive of protected contents, and weak binding of legal obligation. The third section introduced and evaluated the consolidation trend of natural heritage legislation and expected the future developing direction of domestic legislation of natural heritage.Chapterâ…£is divided into five sections. It focused on the analysis of difficulties in the practice of natural heritage protection and tried to point out related legal measures. In the first section, it analyzed the international investment disputes in the natural heritage protection, especially the expropriation, compensation standards and the solution of the disputes. The second section is mainly about the water conservation project in the natural heritage protection, it used the case study methods to analyze the issues of the Glen Canyon Dam v Grand Canyon and Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia Project, and put forward the countermeasures from the view of ecological economics. The third section analyzed the issues of natural heritage management system. Firstly, it used comparative method to analyze the issues about ownership in the natural heritage management, the subject of management and the operational model, especially about the indigenous and administrative nonfeasance. The fourth section is about the introduction on contiguous right and its conflicts. The fifth section is about environmental public interest litigation in the area of natural heritage protection. The thesis analyzed the feasibility and necessity of the establishment of public interest litigation system in natural heritage protection area by considering the current public interest litigation system.Chapterâ…¤is divided into three sections. The first section introduced the current legal status of natural heritage protection in China, including the situation of accession to international conventions and domestic legislation. The second section summarized and commented the problems in the Chinese legislation. The third section tried to put forward improving suggestions of Chinese legislation based on the prior study.