External costs occur if producing or consuming energy services imposes costs upon third parties, such as air pollution-related ecosystem or health impairment to individuals and according clean-up costs to the society.
Lakes are affected by a number of anthropogenic pressures, often resulting in biodiversity loss and impairment of ecosystem services.
This does not necessarily result in impairment of ecosystem services of direct relevance to the land user unless the hypothesised diversity function threshold is breached by elimination of a key functional group or species.
Costs for the impairment of ecosystem services, e.g., natural biological plant protection by beneficial insects, pollination by wild pollinators (e.g., bumble bees and solitary bees), or the production function of soil by soil organisms (e.g., earthworms).
We provide this estimate using regional satellite-derived mine delineations and historical county-level coal production data for the period 1985-2005, and further relate the aerial extent of mining disturbance to stream impairment and loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration potential.
Urbanization alters surface water compared to nonurban landscapes, yet little is known regarding how basic aquatic ecosystem characteristics, such as the abundance and impairment of surface water, differ with population size or regional context.
A one-year supply of coal would result in ∼2,300 km of stream impairment and a loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration capacity comparable to the global warming potential of >33,000 US homes.
Along U.S. coasts, loss or impairment of biodiversity correlates with degraded ecosystem services important to humans [5].
Although this activity contributes significantly to rural employment in Ghana, the apparent wealth resulting from gold mining contrasts with the loss of ecosystems, as well as both health and social impairment on communities.
Given the essential role of damselflies in food web dynamics, these effects may potentially translate into local population impairments with subsequent bottom-up directed effects within and across ecosystem boundaries.
