News
The Environment Protection – stricter legislation and insurance
The tightening legislation in the environment protection area brings to companies enhanced risks of additional costs in connection with a prevention or sanitation of ecological damages.
The pressure for the environment protection strengthens an increasing public interest and new rules brought by the European Directive 2004/35/EC implemented to the Czech legal order by the legislative Act No. 167/2008 of “Ecological damage prevention, its remedy and change of some laws.”
This Act defines newly a whole scope of terms such as for instance “ecological damage” and specifies rights and duties of persons while ecological damage prevention and its remedy in case it happened or is imminent to protected species of free living animals or wild flora at natural regions, water or soil. Further this Act places by §14 a duty of the necessity of provision to defined operators. Although the force of this paragraph is postponed to 1.1.2013 it is necessary to point out that the Act as a whole came into force in summer 2008 already and makes therefore an operator responsible for a possible ecological damage.
The liability connected with ecological damages is, in terms of insurance, being solved by insurers still mostly just marginally, basically on the bases of so called “sudden and unexpected claims,” however, this doesn’t correspond to either the present legislative situation or real business risks. At the insurance market exists quite new interesting product that reacts to the European Directive and offers a possibility of an extended cover, which fully meets the requirements of Act No. 167/2008 and covers a wide variety of risks.
