IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/20846.html

Biodiversity Impacts of Renewable Energy

Author

Listed:
  • Gong, Haozhou
  • Lin, Chen
  • Sautner, Zacharias
  • Schmid, Thomas

Abstract

Renewable energy (RE) is vital for addressing climate change, but the land use of hydro, solar, and wind plants can negatively affect biodiversity through habitat destruction. By combining spatial biodiversity data, satellite imagery, and asset-level information on 40,911 RE plants, we develop a novel measure of RE’s biodiversity impact around the world. We find that solar plants cause the greatest negative impact overall, while hydro plants are located in the most biodiversity-sensitive areas. The biodiversity impact of RE has grown substantially over time, driven by increased land use and siting in more biodiversity-sensitive locations. This impact is highly concentrated, with the top 1% of plants and owners being responsible for the majority of impact. Three finance applications of our measure show that plants with private or financial owners and those that are project financed have lower biodiversity impacts.

Suggested Citation

  • Gong, Haozhou & Lin, Chen & Sautner, Zacharias & Schmid, Thomas, 2025. "Biodiversity Impacts of Renewable Energy," CEPR Discussion Papers 20846, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20846
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP20846
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • Q57 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Ecological Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20846. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.