environmental economics is currently still far from properly evaluating the impacts on land use and ecological systems of electricity generation the important work on the health impacts of air pollution for instance still needs to be replicated in the area of land use direct landuse regulation most often through zoning laws at the local and regional levels are the most common and most widely used form of landuse policy however marketbased schemes such as mitigation banking have been used in some countries to try to ensure that there is no net loss of sensitive ecosystems like oldgrowth forests and wetlands