토양환경보전법의 실효성 확보를 위한 과제와 토양환경평가

Korean Soil Environment Conservation Act has been implemented over a decade. Nevertheless, the number of sites which were remediated according to the statute is limited. To make the statute be more effective, various reforms must be adopted. The central government has not shown much interest in detecting and investigating contaminated sites. There is neither a financial nor personnel resources for the job. The regulatory power belongs to local governments which do not contain either expertise or financial resources. At now, there is shortage of government effort in implementing the statute in terms of executing the cleanup. The more resources should be alloted for the effort to implement the law. The citizen participation should be more encouraged by law. Currently there is duty to report any soil contamination incident except certain relevant officials of regulated industries. Even for these officials the duty is not mandatory. There is no punishment for failure to do so. Thus the law need to adopt mandatory responsibility to report certain contamination incident. In the process of investigation and cleanup of serious soil contamination, the citizen participation must be guaranteed. The result of investigation and the plan of cleanup of certain contamination should be revealed to the public by law. Recently various old factory sites are being closed and sold for development. Many old factory sites were found to be heavily contaminated. Legal dispute over the responsibility to cleanup erupted between seller and purchaser of those sites. In many cases where the environmental due diligence was not undertaken during negotiation, the sellers were found responsible for the cleanup cost and the damages in result. Even though environmental due diligence was adopted within the law the practice was not often used. However, recent court decisions, hopefully, may lead real estate transactions to environmental due diligence. However, there is always possibility for any environmental consulting firm can make mistake in judging the possibility and estimating the extent of contamination at underground world. At this point, the consequence of mistake by any consulting firm is not for sure to whom and how it will be allocated.