Abstract: The research subject is the definition and the essence of environmental damage. The authors note significant contradictions of judicial law enforcement practice in interpreting the essence of this type of damage and the methods of proving it. The analysis of court decisions on this category of cases shows that courts give ambiguous estimation of facts of environmental standards exceedance, and by no means always accept them as evidences of environmental damage. In the authors’ opinion, the reason of such state of things roots in the contradictions of the fundamental Federal Law “On environmental protection”. The authors use both general scientific and specific research methods: dialectical, formal-logical, formal-legal. The authors conclude that to eliminate such two-fold interpretation of this problem, it is necessary to specify the legal definition of “environmental damage”, by linking it to environmental standards. Such consequences as degradation of eco-systems and natural resources depletion should be, on the contrary, excluded from the definition, since they don’t meet the requirements of legal certainty of the norm and can’t be verified. Based on this fact, the authors propose their own formulation of the definition of environmental damage.