A Study On Defects And Amendment Of Compensation Legislation Of Marine Ecological Damages By Oil Spill At Sea In China

Along with the continuous development of petroleum industry and economic profit brought by it, accidents like oil spill at sea also happen more frequently. While the controversy still focuses on general property damage, ConocoPhillips and Deepwater Horizon oil spills, as the most serious domestic and international accidents, achieved unprecedented concern on its marine ecological damage.Many scholars researchers have been citing these two accidents as examples to evaluate the compensation legislation on marine ecological damage,which is partly agreed. The contribution of this article is to split and compare the two cases for a more detailed research on marine ecological problems on the basis of definition and discrimination of related basic concepts and concludes that legislation on this issue has quite a large space to be improved. Therefore, the paper will propose feasible suggestions based on China’s actual situation and referred to more developed legislation model in US, promote coordination between multi-sectors to accelerate the legislation process on marine ecological damage from oil spill.The paper consists of three chapters. First chapter defines and discriminates related concepts of marine ecological damages by oil spill at sea, basically involves the concept of marine ecological and its discrimination between concept of marine environment and marine resources, relationship of marine ecological damage and marine environmental damage, then defines the concept of marine ecological damages by oil spill at sea. The second chapter compares and analyzes the ecological damage from two accidents against the focus of controversy in detail, and then comes to the insufficiency of China’s legislation on1) definition of marine ecological damage and regime of compensation;2) responsible parties and qualified parties to claim;3) amount of compensation and evaluation criteria;4) compensation fund. Finally, chapter three summarizes the analysis for more detailed suggestions, advocates more cognition on the macro definition, more understanding on legislation blank, and learns from more developed legal system of US to facilitate special legislation on marine ecological damage as soon as possible.