The Study Of Environmental Conservation Easement Institution

The rapid development of social economy brought the variety and urgency environmental problems, which had given rise to the revolution of government modern environmental regulation. The environmental conservation easement arises at this historic moment.The environmental conservation easement is a legally binding agreement between the owner of the land encumbered by the easement and the holder of the easement for preventing intensification of land use on property having important natural, agricultural, scenic or historic value to achieve certain public environmental goals. It can be owned by the government or public welfare organizations and give reasonable compensation to the restricted landowner.It belongs to the public easement, which is a kind of private right that can be referred as a public right and be ruled by both the public law and private law. The environmental conservation easement is a special easement because it is mostly owned by the government and privates and could be signed without the existence of the need-easement land.It can be classified as consultative servitude, mandatory servitude, forest conservation easement, historical and stylistic building easement and so on.In the United States, the environmental conservation easements are a legal tool designed to extinguish most or all of the development potential of land in the interest of conservation and have been developed well. It belongs to the easement in gross and has the character of public welfare. What’s more, it is perpetual in most cases. The use of conservation easements has grown dramatically in the last twenty years. The 《Uniform Easement Act》 and 《Internal Revenue Code》 of the federal legal system give the strong support for the construction of the environmental conservation easement. What’s more, most states of the United States enacted relatively systematic laws about the conservation easement. As a representative of the mixed form of property rights, environmental conservation in US is a mixture of economic value and ecological value of land and promotes the combination of the real right and environment right. In the process of the globalization of the environmental conservation easement, some common law countries such as African countries accepted the transplantation of environmental conservation easement with the attitude of relatively conservative, while other common law countries accept this new concept and improve the system of it. In Chile, the congress try to set up a new property rights under the framework of traditional civil law for the environmental conservation easement which received widespread support.In continental law countries, although migration process is difficult, they still attempt to build and try to make a breakthrough of the environmental protection easement. According to the overview of the environmental conservation easement in the world, it gives us the idea to innovate our environment regulation and it could overcome some difficulties such as bureaucratism and "government failure". But we should be conscious the issue that the construction of environmental conservation easement must be based on legal support and the mature social atmosphere which consists of the highly developed market economy and the highly development of the public organizations, which means a long way to go.Economy value and ecology value are two contradictory but mutual fusion values of the ecology resources. Environmental conservation easement is the concentrated reflection of property rights and environmental rights. It coordinates the ecological value and economic value of the resources to achieve sustainable development. In the face of the contradiction of public or private that the public land requisition brought in China, the environmental conservation easement, as the representative of the mixed system of property rights, has significant change to the environmental administrative mode transition and make us reconsider our administration philosophy.On the basis of respect for private land rights and interests, the environment conservation easements improve the efficiency of our environmental protection. So it is necessary to construct the environmental conservation easement in our country. What’s more, environmental conservation easement provides channels for public participation in the environmental management and it stimulates the public’s enthusiasm to participate in the environmental regulation. However, with the demand of the reality in our country environment, the new legal concepts such as forest conservation easement and grassland conservation easement are promoted by our specialists. And the increasingly mature social soil also provides the realistic and feasibility conditions for the construction of environment conservation easement in our country.Therefore, to construct the special system, we should according to the principle of "public power participation in and gradually transition", the establishment of the policy, the construction of legal norms, the procedural system, the supporting system and the design of complementary system should work together. First of all, we should enact regulations in our real property law and environment laws to establish the basic status of the environmental conservation easement and provide institutional support for it. Secondly, through the diversified means of administrative subsidies and to absorb abundant social capital to establish the diversity compensation mechanism is essential. In the respect of procedure program, we must strictly regulate the executive program, supervision program and relief procedures. In details, the government can take the lead in signing the environment conservation easement through administrative contracts and should be given priority to. Depends on the experience from Africa countries, we can introduce abroad famous public welfare institutions to coordinate with our agencies to construct the environmental conservation easement. With the aspect of local public welfare institutions, we can use the administrative permission to authorize the public welfare institutions to participate in environmental protection. At the same time, to respect the background of the public economic institution in our country, we should confirm the legal statues of the land user to sigh the environmental conservation easement. To maintain the dynamic balance between public rights and private interests, giving the court more afterwards judicial remedy rights is necessary. In respect of complement system, we should strengthen the system of environmental public participation and improve the philosophy of our government administration. In summary, only by this way can we make the way more stable and order to build the institution of the environmental conservation easement in our country.