Wind power is one of the renewable energy solutions to meet the challenges of climate change. However, it comes with potential conflicts with other sustainability goals, such as biodiversity. These need to be addressed in regional wind power planning, taking multiple sustainability aspects into account. This project aims to develop methods and the related Rewind-GIS tool for integrating biodiversity in wind power planning on regional level, targeting to meet multiple sustainability goals and to support municipal planning. The REWIND-GIS tool is based on spatial multi-criteria analysis methods to find and evaluate suitable areas for wind farm development. In cooperation with stakeholders, we integrate factors representing wind resources with biodiversity, with subfactors representing sensitive birds, forest and wetland ecosystems, as well as social and other main planning factors. After aggregating and weighing the factors in cooperation with stakeholders, we designed scenarios using opportunistic and defensive approaches. Finally a set of sites were selected for evaluation regarding potential energy output and suitability from wind power developer, social and biodiversity perspectives. In this way, synergies and trade-offs could be quantified and visualised, and main conflicting factors could be localised and discussed during the process. The methodology and the Rewind-GIS tool has potential to be useful for transparent and strategic landscape planning on regional and municipal scales.
QC 20210608