A global assessment of the risks to biodiversity and Indigenous people’s lands from solar and wind farms

Abstract

The share of wind and solar energy in global energy mix is rising rapidly. Despite their great potential for reducing carbon emissions, poorly planned wind and solar farms may encroach on socio-ecologically sensitive areas, threatening biodiversity and Indigenous people’s traditional land uses. However, these potential risks associated with wind and solar farm development worldwide are poorly understood. Here, we evaluate the potential biodiversity and Indigenous risks from wind and solar energy development by examining the extent to which global wind and solar farms are situated within or adjacent to socio-ecologically sensitive areas. Our analysis revealed that 13,699 wind and solar farms or 14.4 % of the farms’ total footprint area are within protected areas, critical habitats, and Indigenous people’s lands, occupying a total of 26,840 km² of those socio-ecologically sensitive areas. Wind and solar farms overlap with the distribution ranges of 2,310 threatened amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles, accounting for 36.3 % of the world’s 6,362 threatened vertebrate species. The encroachment of solar and wind farms on sensitive areas mostly occurs in economically developed countries with substantial wind and solar energy facilities, while many developing countries in the tropics tend to have a higher proportion of such farms situated within sensitive areas. Compared to wind farms, solar farms pose greater risks to biodiversity and Indigenous people’s lands. These findings provide valuable insights into the socio-ecological risks of wind and solar energy development and highlight the urgent need for strategic planning to mitigate the risks.

Keywords

Renewable energy / Solar photovoltaic / Wind farms / Biodiversity / Indigenous people / Land use conflicts

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yuqing Wang: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Software, Methodology, Data curation, Conceptualization. Qian Ding: Writing – review & editing, Validation. Xuan Hao: Validation, Data curation. Hongbo Yang: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Zelong Qu: Validation, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the early draft of our manuscript. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 42471287 and 32201422) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100371.

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