Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Acidification and Eutrophication
This method is based on observed affects from acidification and eutrophication on plants.
From these observations the probability that a plant species still occurs in an area can be
determined. This is called probability of occurrence, which is translated to potentially
disappeared fraction. Since acidification and eutrophication do not necessary reduce number
of species, target species were used. Those are the species that should occur on a specific type
of ecosystem if there would have been no anthropogenic changes in the nutrient level or
acidity. The damage model calculates to what extend the numbers of target species increase
or decreases if an additional deposition is added to the background. It is not possible to
determine whether damage is caused by changes in the nutrient level or the acidity. For this
reason the impact categories have been combined [88].
Land Use
For land use potentially disappeared fraction was used. The damage model is rather
complex as four different models; local affect on land occupation, conversion, regional effect
on land occupation and conversion. The local affect refers to changes in species numbers
occurring on the occupied or converted land itself, while the regional effect refers to changes
on the natural areas outside the occupied or converted area [88].
Resources
In the Eco indicator 99 methodology only models of mineral and fossil fuels are
available. The use of agricultural biotic resources and the mining of resources such as sand or
gravel are considered to be adequately converted by the effects on land use. In the case of
non-renewable resources, it is obvious that there is a limit on the human use of these
resources, but it is rather arbitrary to give figures in the total quantity per resources existing in
the accessible part of the earth crust. Because of this problem, the Eco indicator 99
methodology does not consider the quantity of resources as such, but rather the qualitative
structure of resources [88].
Normalisation
The three damage categorise all have different units. In order to use a set of
dimensionless weighing factors from the panel we must make these damage categories
dimensionless. Standard Eco indicators are numbers that express the total environmental load
of a product or process. The standard Eco indicator values can be regarded as dimensionless
figures. As name we use Eco indicator point (Pt). The absolute value of the points is not very
relevant as the main purpose is to compare relative differences between products or
components. The scale is chose in such way that the value of 1 Pt is representative for one
thousandth of the yearly environmental load of one average European inhabitant [88].
C
ASE
S
TUDIES OF
E
NVIRONMENTAL AND
H
EALTH
A
SSESSMENT OF
S
UGAR
B
EET
B
IOETHANOL
P
RODUCTION
In this chapter we present environmental and health assessment of sugar beet bioethanol
production for three different locations e.g., Belgium, France and United Kingdom.
