Page 261 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

10 Life Cycle Impact Assessment 247

Fig. 10.23 The land use
impact category focuses on
damage to biodiversity— ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
which represents the Provisioning
foundation of ecosystems—as • Food
well as on the provision of • Fresh water
ecosystem services, due to • Wood and fiber
land conversion and land use • Fuel
[adapted from Millenium • …
Ecosystem Assessment
(2005)] Supporting Regulating
• Nutrient cycling • Climate regulation
• Soil formation • Flood regulation
• Primary • Disease regulation
production • Water purification
• … • …
Cultural
• Aesthetic
• Spiritual
• Educational
• Recreational
• …

LIFE ON EARTH –BIODIVERSITY

assess nutrients, pesticides and any other types of emission to the ecosphere which
are characterised by the corresponding emission-based impact category (e.g. eu-
trophication for emission of nutrients, ecotoxicity for emission of pesticides). Their
inclusion in the land-use category would lead to double counting of the same
impact.
The general land-use environmental mechanism follows the model of Fig. 10.24.
It shows the cause–effect chain from the elementary flow (i.e. land transformation
or land occupation) to the endpoint damages on human health and ecosystems as
well as available soil resources. Land transformation refers to the conversion from
one state to another (also known as land use change, LUC) and land occupation to
the use of a certain area for a particular purpose (also known as land use, LU). The
figure should be read as follows, giving an example of the depicted impact path-
ways: land occupation leads to physical changes to soil, which leads to an altered
soil function and affects habitats and net primary production which eventually leads
to damage on ecosystem quality. The picture provides a good display of the
complexity involved in land-use modelling. For some of the presented impacts,
such as warming effect due to albedo change or landscape impairment, character-
isation models have yet to be developed.
The same type of human activity may cause different land-use related impacts
depending on the region of the world where the activity takes place. This variation
is due to the strong influence of climate, soil quality, topography and ecological
quality on the magnitude of the impact. For example, deforestation of a forest area