Date: 2 November 2023
In order to meet renewable energy goals, many countries are pushing to expedite their permitting procedures and impact assessments for renewable energy projects. While it’s beneficial to push for more renewable energy systems, it’s imperative that we discuss how we can balance the pursuit of clean energy with preserving our remaining biodiversity.
As the rapidly increasing demand for renewable energy and mining for resources has already had a huge effect on biodiversity, Estonian Green Movement organised a webinar with the aim to find solutions on how to minimise the impacts of solar and wind parks on biodiversity and to inspire people to develop biodiversity rich renewable energy parks.
Agenda:
- Introduction
- How can we reconciliate local communities with renewable energy development?
- Biodiverse solar parks
- Facilitating nature coexistence with wind farms through AI based environmental monitoring
- Q&A
- Summary
The participants of the webinar got practical tips on how to retrain and promote nature in solar parks and saw different examples of biodiverse solar parks. Since one of the most relevant non-technical barriers affecting the expansion of the offshore renewable energy sector is the potential environmental risk and related uncertainties there was a presentation on facilitating nature coexistence with wind farms through AI based computer vision. In addition, we discussed how to ensure successful cooperation with local communities so that renewable energy developments can be located closer to people and not in biodiversity hotspots. All the presentations of the webinar can be found here.
The solution-oriented approach in the webinar inspired participants with examples of how to wisely plan renewable energy developments. During the webinar, the participants actively participated in the discussion, presenting reflections and questions to the speakers.
The webinar was attended by 98 participants from 15 EU countries. There were 4 guest speakers present at the webinar coming from the Estonian Ministry of Climate, University of Tartu, Estonian Fund for Nature and Spoor.
If you missed the Estonian Green Movement webinar you can see the recording of the webinar ‘Let’s talk about solutions – how could renewable energy and biodiversity coexist?’ here.
More details on the webinar and how it was evaluated by the participants can be found in the detailed event description here.
