NEEDS (New Energy Externalities Developments for Sustainability)

Within the 6th EU-Framework Programme, econcept developed for the integrated project NEEDS (New Energy Externalities Developments for Sustainability) a methodology to assess biodiversity losses due to land use changes and airborne emissions of energy production and consumption.

The methodology builds on the work of Eco-indicator and Koellner («Land Use in Product Life Cycles and its Consequences for Ecosystem Quality», 2001) to derive potentially disappeared frac-tions (PDF) due to certain land use changes as well as depositions of SOx, NOx and NH3. The resulting PDF-changes are then valued by using a restoration cost approach. The resulting external costs per unit of PDF-change as well as per kg deposition of SOx, NOx and NH3 are presented for 32 different European countries and validated with results from different willingness to pay studies.