RESPONSABILITÀ CIVILE AMBIENTALE E INQUINAMENTO STORICO

Tort liability for environmental damages and historical pollution The work explores the issue of tort liability for environmental damages, with specific reference to the cases of liability for the so called “historical” pollution, where such term indicates events of long standing environmental deterioration. The starting point is the analysis of a lawsuit decided by the Court of Milan in 2012, relating to damages, either or not of environmental kind, claimed by certain government authorities against the last owner of an industrial site for the production of chemical products. Such industrial site had remained active over the entire twentieth century under the ownership and management of different entities who contributed, to different extent, to the whole status of environmental deterioration identified on the spot. Moving from the case at stake, the work recalls the laws governing the compensation of environmental damages under the Italian legal system, from law 349/86 until the so called Environmental Code (legislative decree 152/06), and the EU legal system, in such last respect with specific reference to EU Directive 2004/35/CE. The analysis of the case has guided the verification, in the application stage, of the solutions created by scholars and case law, and the debate on the different functions that the institute of tort liability holds in respect of the issue of environmental damage. A particular attention has been reserved, on the basis of the scholars’ and case law’s arguments developed over the years, to crucial issues in the scholars’ debate: the legal notion of environment and environmental damage, the question of identifying the persons liable, the role of the cause-to-effect relation, the criteria for allocating the liability, the relationship between the regulation governing the environmental damage and the one governing the recovery, the methods of compensation.