Environmental burden of acid gas emissions associated with the exceedence of critical loads

This paper demonstrates an approach to assessing environmental burdens based on optimising the integrated deposition footprints of characteristic sources, such as power stations, urban areas or poultry farms, relative to 1 km×1 km ecosystem-dependent critical loads. It makes use of a penalty function and an adjoint Green's function method describing how the deposition of acid gases and reduced nitrogen compounds compare with critical loads, from which the optimum source location in Great Britain may be found. The effect of a unit of emission from a source category can be described on a single map. This simple risk based approach to environmental burdens is compared to a more elaborate optimisation, using large combustion plant emissions as an example.