Essential damage to the environment resulting from rf’s atrocities in Ukraine call for the development of a methodology to estimate the compensation for the expenditures related to the environmental remediation and restoration. This kind of methodology must enable the estimation of the amount which would objectively cover the compensation costs for the environment regeneration in Ukraine. The challenging nature and importance of such a methodology make us resort to the experience of other countries in this sphere.
Among the methodologies which are actively exploited in the USA is Habitat Equivalency Assessment. Below is a closer look at HEA.
The US Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Damage Assessment, Remediation and Restoration Program outlines this methodology in the following way. Claims for the damage to natural resources have three basic components:
- the cost of restoring the injured resources to baseline, or “primary restoration”;
- compensation for the interim loss of resources from the time of injury until the resources recover to baseline;
- the reasonable costs of performing the damage assessment