To name a few, degraded mining land in South Africa has been repurposed for renewables, solar panels are being combined with vegetation, water harvesting and sand-control measures in China’s deserts and solar irrigation is helping farmers in India use the same land for food production and clean energy.
The transition away from fossil fuels will require much more solar, wind and other renewable-energy infrastructure, with an emerging physical footprint that expects to see the 500,000 hectares currently used for renewable-energy projects reach three million hectares by 2032. Renewable-energy expansion is potentially “one of history’s largest land use transformations”, said Julian Blanc, head of the Biodiversity and Land Branch at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
“The real question is no longer whether renewable energy is going to expand or not. It is, and the question is whether it expands in ways that leaves landscapes, ecosystems and people better off than before.”
From the land occupied by solar panels to the transmission lines needed to carry electricity, the key to impactful renewables is developing and executing effective multi-purpose land-restoring projects, experts said. That means thinking about land before projects are built, Muralee Thummarukudy, Director of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification’s G20 Global Land Initiative, said.
“When you place it at the right location, solar is the solution, not only for energy but also for ecological restoration, but in another situation, that may not be the case,” he said, emphasising that context is critical, from Mongolian rangelands to Chinese deserts.
Source: The UN
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