Abstract
Abstract Wind energy development continues to expand rapidly to meet international climate targets. However, these developments impact biodiversity and associated sustainability targets negatively. Environmental impact assessments (EIA) predominately focus on site-specific impacts; failing to account for cumulative impacts at larger spatial scales. Life cycle assessments (LCA) can take such a holistic view, however models quantifying the main impact pathways on biodiversity are still lacking. To address this gap, we present a methodology to quantify habitat loss, disturbance and collision impacts of onshore wind power plants on bird biodiversity globally. By overlaying species ranges with wind-power plant locations, species-area relationships were used to calculate the potentially disappeared fraction of species (PDF) for the three impact pathways. Results revealed habitat-specific bird richness values, at order level, which were greatest in tropical and subtropical regions. Temporal changes in PDF were related to operationalizing wind-power plants. Despite similar PDF curves throughout the time period, disturbance and habitat loss had a greater effect compared to collisions. Annual energy production values strongly affected overall impacts for all impact pathways, which in turn differed between continents. When controlling for continent, bird order rather than country more strongly influenced variation in the pathway-specific PDF per GWh. Our approach represents the first step towards incorporating the impacts of wind power production in strategic environmental planning and the LCA framework. Failing to account for these negates an assessment of the trade-offs between biodiversity and energy production, and therefore the balancing of global sustainability goals.
Highlights
Climate change concerns (UNFCCC 2016) and the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have boosted the innovation, development and application of renewable energy sources worldwide
Currently no life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) models exist that can quantify the main impact pathways of wind energy development on biodiversity. To address this methodological gap, we present for the first time a LCIA methodology aimed to quantify the habitat loss, disturbance and collision impacts of onshore wind-power plants on bird biodiversity, and apply this approach on a global level
The quantification of the impacts of wind-power plants on birds at the order level is based on the generic concept of a species-area relationship (SAR), which is widely used in Life cycle assessments (LCA)
Summary
Climate change concerns (UNFCCC 2016) and the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have boosted the innovation, development and application of renewable energy sources worldwide. Onshore wind energy is expected to expand by over 300 GW in the coming five years (2019–2024; IEA, 2019a) This represents a forecasted 9% annual increase up to 2024 following the current policy scenario. Pursuing efforts to limit [it] to 1.5C00 by 2030, as well as related Sustainable Development Goals (SDG3 – Good Health and Well-being, SDG7 – Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG13 – Climate Action), requires an annual increase in onshore wind energy generation of 12%. This represents a yearly net capacity expansion from 47 GW in 2018 to 108 GW in 2030 (IEA, 2019b). The development of renewable energy adds to the pervasive and continuous anthropogenic land-use change causing unprecedented declines in biodiversity (Pimm et al 2014; Rounsevell et al 2018)
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