The Research On Issues On Identifying Environmental Tort Causations

Causation is one of the elements which constitute the system of civil tort liability, and its function is to present a de fact causal chain for investigating tort liabilities. In civil environmental tort litigations, identifying causations plays a key role in punishing offenders and relieving victims both. Environmental torts are special kinds of civil torts, and environmental tort causations are also special kinds of complex causations.Compared with the traditional civil torts, environmental torts have no difference in the nature. But, due to the media role environmental factors played in the infringement processes, environmental tort causations contain two causal relationships in fact. One is the causations between infringements from offenders and environmental pollutions, and the other is the causations between environmental pollutions and victims who live in the environment. The defection of causal processes, self-purification capacity of environment and lag of the damages make environmental tort causations become indirect, hidden, complex and hard to be proved. In some circumstances, value judgments are often needed in identifying environmental tort causations. These features of environmental tort causations referred above lead to difficult issues on identifying them, including hard to realize the tort processes, hard to avoid the defects of science and technology, hard to distribute the burdens of proof and hard to satisfy the demands of standard of proof. To adopt the implementation of causation presumption is the best way to resolve the problems referred above. But, according to theories, scholars proposed, such as causation theories of probability, causation theories of immunology and causation theories of rule of thumb, it's not difficult to find that these theories attempt to reduce the burdens of proof on victims with lower the standard of proof. There are also some inevitable drawbacks to use those theories. With more and more complex environmental tort cases occurring, identifying environmental tort causations become extremely hard.To avoid the drawbacks of implementation of causation presumption theories referred above, the mode of causation dichotomy in Common Law must be followed, and that causation presumption is the presumption of causations in fact must be understood. Due to the factors, such as complexity of cases, value judgments are needed to be adopted in some special circumstances. To take presumption as a basic way to identify environmental tort causation, a multi-ranks system of proof, which will distinguish different subjects and objects, and lower the standard of proof on victims, must be established. What's more, complex environmental tort causations should be classified, and this can help judges apply different causation presumption in a flexible way. Meanwhile, in order to keep these causation presumption theories could be operated well, particular attention to the issues on theory localization and establishment of supporting mechanisms must be paid also.