The clean energy transition needs land. Can it help restore it too?

This article is published in association with United Nations.

What if the infrastructure needed to fight climate change could also help repair the land beneath it?

At a UN desertification conference this week in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, experts at a side-event examined how renewable energy expansion can co-exist with land protection and restoration, spotlighting examples from around the world.

To name a few, degraded mining land in South Africa has been repurposed for renewables, solar panels are being combined with vegetation, water harvesting and sand-control measures in China’s deserts and solar irrigation is helping farmers in India use the same land for food production and clean energy.

The transition away from fossil fuels will require much more solar, wind and other renewable-energy infrastructure, with an emerging physical footprint that expects to see the 500,000 hectares currently used for renewable-energy projects reach three million hectares by 2032.

Renewable-energy expansion is potentially “one of history’s largest land use transformations”, said Julian Blanc, head of the Biodiversity and Land Branch at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

“The real question is no longer whether renewable energy is going to expand or not. It is, and the question is whether it expands in ways that leaves landscapes, ecosystems and people better off than before.”

Context is critical

From the land occupied by solar panels to the transmission lines needed to carry electricity, the key to impactful renewables is developing and executing effective multi-purpose land-restoring projects, experts said.

That means thinking about land before projects are built, Muralee Thummarukudy, Director of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification’s G20 Global Land Initiative, said.

“When you place it at the right location, solar is the solution, not only for energy but also for ecological restoration, but in another situation, that may not be the case,” he said, emphasising that context is critical, from Mongolian rangelands to Chinese deserts.

‘Nothing is impact free’

Solar development can also require vegetation clearing, disturb wildlife or alter how water moves across the land and, in some circumstances, increase flood risk.

Even well-designed projects can create problems when too many begin to affect the same landscape, a case in point in Malawi’s Shire River Basin, where UNEP found that several hydropower plants could collectively put pressure on fisheries, biodiversity and downstream communities.

“Nothing is impact free,” said UNEP’s Mr. Blanc.

However, the order in which projects are planned could be flipped before deciding where to build infrastructure, he said, suggesting the first step should examine the wider landscape – its biodiversity, water, communities, migration routes and exposure to floods or drought – instead of starting by selecting a site then studying its environmental impacts.

Local communities and knowledge must also play a planning role because they may understand drought, flood or other risks that technical assessments miss, he added.

Investing beyond electricity

Indeed, careful planning can reveal places where renewable energy and other land uses do not have to compete, said Gayathri Nair, a programme officer at the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Instead of competing with agriculture for land, solar became another part of how a farm could generate value, she said, pointing to a successful solar irrigation programme in India that’s helping farmers with small landholdings.

Initially hesitant to install panels on their farms, the farmers got assistance from a digital platform developed with a partner organization to identify the parts of their land best suited for solar.

Then the local utility helped set up a digital payment system so farmers could be paid for surplus electricity. The electricity could power irrigation pumps while the surplus provided farmers with an additional source of income.

Tech tackles deserts

Technology is already restoring land through solar projects in China’s deserts.

“Compared with the pristine desert environment, the ecological situation of most desert photovoltaic bases in China [has] achieved a sustainable improvement,” said He Jijiang, a researcher at Tsinghua University, recalling recent field visits.

Solar-powered pumps are used to move water for irrigation and support vegetation that helps stabilise sand along roads in the Taklamakan Desert.

Meanwhile, in the Tengger Deserts, solar panels reduce evaporation and wind near the ground as shrubs help hold drifting sand in place. Water falling from the panels’ edges can be collected and directed towards plants, vegetation around installations can be used for livestock feed and other plants are helping to stabilise the sand or support honey production.

Promising, but not a blueprint

While these good practices across the world are promising, they are not a blueprint.

UNEP will soon issue a global call for case studies on renewable-energy projects that have found ways to work with land, water, biodiversity and communities, aiming to give countries more evidence to draw on as renewable energy expands.

As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said, the world must both “break our dependence on fossil fuels” and “protect and restore nature at scale”.

In Mongolia this week, one of the questions being discussed is how those two goals can be pursued on the same piece of land.