THE CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND LEGAL TERMINOLOGY
Authors:   Volgograd State University (Volgograd, Russian Federation), Anisimov Alexey P. , Butayeva Elena M. ,   Baltic Federal University named after Immanuel Kant (Kaliningrad, Russian Federation), Smirenskaya Elena V. ,   Volgograd State University (Volgograd, Russian Federation)
Published: May 2021

The article examines the main stages in the development of environmental and legal ter-minology and analyzes crucial terminology discussions. The authors conclude that terminology issues are among the key issues when discussing the effectiveness of the legal regulatory mechanism. The achievement of the goals and objectives set before the relevant legislation act depends on how adequately the legal terminology in-laws represents the social phenomena and processes to be legally regulated. The study of environmental and legal terminology shows that over the past decades, some key terminology problems of environmental law have been resolved. In particular, the article gives a detailed analysis of the discussions about the name of the branch of environmental law, recognition of a person not only as a subject but also as an object of environmental legal relations, the correlation of the categories of "envi-ronmental protection" and "environmental safety”. The authors pay special attention to the analysis of modern environmental and legal ter-minology. They prove that modern environmental legislation deals with as many as three terminological models used by the legislators. The first model covers land, subsoil, water, forests, air, wildlife i.e. the components of the natural environment, but not natural objects (federal law “On Environmental Protection”, federal laws "On the Animal World", "On the Protection of Atmospheric Air"). The second model covers the subsoil - neither a component of the natural environment nor natural object (due to the absence of a terminology article in the Russian Law on subsoil). The third model covers land and forests - natural objects and natural resources, but not components of the environment (in case of water objects by way of doctrinal interpretation, it can be assumed that the law includes water into the category of "natural environment components" as "the most important constituent part of the environment"). Proposals are made to optimize environmental and legal terminology and to eliminate the identified conflicts of laws. Given that the development of environmental law continues, there is an objective need to set new legal tasks conditioned by the deterioration of the environment in Russia and the world (e.g. climate change and environmental terrorism). To solve these new tasks, it is necessary to further improve environmental and legal ter-minology, to discuss new definitions that adequately reflect the legal reality. The improve-ment of the quality of environmental and legal definitions, enhancement of systematicity of environmental and legal terminology in the discussed drafts of the Ecological Code of the Russian Federation will enable us not only to sum up the terminological discussions of recent years but also to take into account new standards of legal technology that will improve the quality of legal regulation.