Land-use trade-offs of utility-scale solar power: An NDVI-based assessment of ecological impacts and recovery trajectories

The post-COP29 acceleration of renewable energy deployment has intensified concerns about how PV expansion interacts with land resources and ecosystem resilience. Focusing on China, the world’s largest PV market, this study provides a national-scale, long-term assessment of PV deployment and vegetation greenness using NDVI data and 26,442 PV deployment sites from 2000 to 2022. We construct 26,600 counterfactual locations through nearby-point sampling and Coarsened Exact Matching, and estimate vegetation responses using a staggered difference-in-differences design. PV deployment is associated with statistically significant reductions in vegetation greenness, with NDVI declining by approximately 2.5% within 300 m, 1.5% within 500 m, and 0.7% within 1 km, indicating a clear distance decay pattern. In addition, larger PV footprint areas are associated with greater vegetation loss across all spatial scales. Event study evidence reveals a trajectory of disturbance and subsequent adjustment, with a sharp NDVI decline in the deployment year, persistent negative effects in subsequent years, and gradual attenuation over time. Vegetation responses are highly heterogeneous across land-use contexts, with cropland and woodland experiencing the largest losses. By contrast, built-up land shows only weak negative effects, grassland effects are generally close to zero, and unused land exhibits positive vegetation responses, while wind and sand prevention zones show localized mitigation effects. These findings underscore that the ecological consequences of PV expansion are strongly shaped by land-use context, deployment scale, and governance arrangements. Looking ahead to COP31, the results suggest the need to move beyond capacity-centered renewable targets toward land-sensitive solar governance frameworks that integrate siting constraints, restoration obligations, and long-term ecological monitoring to better align climate mitigation with ecosystem resilience.