Ecological leakage is the accounting-boundary problem seen as a flow rather than a circle: a real cost that a system caused, that crossed its jurisdictional boundary, and that never appeared in the system’s own books because it landed on someone outside the circle. Pollution is the classic case, but labor displacement, exported cyber risk, surveillance externalities, and political destabilization all leak in exactly the same way — each a genuine cost, counted nowhere.
It converts directly into one of the framework’s most foundational rules: an ecology cannot claim improvement by excluding significant leaked costs from its own performance measure. A system that looks healthier only because it stopped counting what it pushes over the fence has not become healthier; it has relocated its wasted geometry somewhere it is no longer charged for. Leakage is a species of ecological transfer — the uncounted kind — and seeing it without prying open every interior is precisely what bounded ecological observability is for.