The component covers all external costs due to the degradation of the environmental medium soil that have been not considered until now. The focus is on damages that are not already included in other cost components of the NWI (e.g. air) (preliminary planned item, in prices of 2010).
Soil is responsible for a wide variety of ecological and socioeconomic services: habitat for human beings, animals and plants, provision of a major part of material transformation and decomposition processes in ecosystems, filtration and storage for water- and mass balance, basis for agriculture and forestry, archive of natural and cultural history.