Energy Sprawl Solutions

Nature Conservancy scientist Joseph M. Kiesecker is a lead editor (alongside scientist David E. Naugle) of a new book, Energy Sprawl Solutions: Balancing Global Development and Conservation (Publication Date: June 15, 2017). The book provides a roadmap for an energy future that conserves functional and connected ecosystems. The key to success, they show, is identifying the right energy mix and where to place it. This commonsense solution involves identifying and preemptively setting aside land where biodiversity should be protected, while consolidating energy development in areas with lower conservation value.

Learn more about the book here. For media inquiries, click here.

Mongolia's Many Means: Development by Design for Landscapes, Wildlife and Culture

Mongolia’s vast landscapes are rich with coal, mineral and wind energy resources. How this resource development takes place will greatly affect the economy, nomadic livelihoods and the environment. The potential for conflict over competing claims for land looms large, requiring a delicate balance to be struck between development and conservation.

Recognizing this challenge, the government of Mongolia has supported landscape-scale planning for the entire country in support of sustainable development and has enacted an enlightened planning framework into law. They have embraced proactive planning, which accounts for biological resources, ecosystem services, climate change and projected development. This framework for identifying priority conservation areas and recommended practices at the outset is allowing the country to better minimize impacts and more effectively manage environmental and economic risks.

The plans are helping to guide project siting and mitigation, as well as the establishment of new protected areas that support nomadic livelihoods and wildlife. The approach includes a commitment to protect 30 percent of the country. To date, there has been real progress on that commitment. In roughly the last five years, the government has designated 150,000 square kilometers of new protected land—an area approximately the size of Nepal.

Power to the People: Pursuing Affordable and Cleaner Energy in India

As the global population grows, we need to generate far more energy from renewable sources. For example, India seeks to generate 40 percent of its power from renewables by 2030, and that cannot be achieved without massive new solar and wind installations.

But while renewables are the best path to reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants that damage human health, wind and solar farms have significant land footprints. The transmission lines required to transmit renewable energy into our power grid can further fragment habitats and become conduits for non-native species that disrupt ecosystems. Our attempts to meet climate change emission targets and close the energy access gap could create a new problem of “energy sprawl” that accelerates land-use change and conflict.

While we can continue to work towards decoupling economic growth from energy use—and significant advances have been made in some developed economies—we need to steer development to already-converted areas and make the most of existing transmission capacity. We must develop regional energy plans that avoid the most important natural lands and locate energy production as close as possible to the industries and houses where it will be consumed. It’s a huge challenge, but the establishment of renewables-based micro-grids and new tools that can simulate and evaluate the economic impact of energy choices give grounds for optimism. India has the potential to show the rest of the developing world how to achieve comprehensive access to affordable energy without compromising on environmental concerns.

Fine Feathered Friend: Protecting the Sage Grouse in the United States and Canada

As a result of threats from energy development and cultivation, as well as catastrophic wildfire, invasive annual grasses and conifer invasion, the greater sage-grouse of western North America and southern Canada was considered a candidate species for listing under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA). Against this backdrop of precipitous decline, a proactive, coordinated, voluntary, and incentive-based effort provided a clear roadmap for landscape-scale conservation of the species and its ecosystem.

Strategic conservation features prominently in this story because user groups and state and federal governments wished to avoid ESA listing, and worked together to reduce threats. Regional planning and spatial prioritization provided the foundation for partners to target where to focus conservation efforts, balancing energy needs and habitat protection. As the primary land managers, the federal Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service completed the bulk of the public land policy protections. But significant investment was also made to conserve and enhance an additional five million hectares of private lands inside sage-grouse strongholds.

The sage-grouse story to date illustrates how a proactive, coordinated, landscape-scale conservation approach has the potential to maximize biodiversity conservation and maintain energy development. And it provides a real-world model for including biodiversity conservation across all development planning.

Biofuels of Brazil: Sustaining Production Expansion and Environmental Quality

Biofuels have been embraced as a promising alternative to oil, because in principle they can reduce carbon emissions, enhance domestic energy security and revitalize rural economies. But, biofuel feedstocks can use up to a thousand times more land per unit energy than natural gas, oil, coal, wind, hydropower or solar.

By 2040, global biofuel production may double or triple, requiring an additional 44 to 118 million hectares of land—expansion that would exceed a land area equivalent to the U.S. state of Texas. How this future land conversion occurs will have a major impact on biodiversity, ecosystems and the climate, as well as on challenges such as food production.

The Nature Conservancy has investigated the potential for targeted land-use planning to achieve commodity production and environmental goals in the Brazilian cerrado, the world’s most diverse tropical savannah. We applied spatial optimization techniques to map marginal service values, assess economic and environmental trade-offs, and find efficient land-use patterns.

The work has demonstrated that biofuels production and environmental goals can be met with landscape planning, even in a biodiversity and agricultural hotspot. Legal, voluntary and market mechanisms, if effectively implemented and widely adopted by agricultural producers in affected landscapes, hold promise of delivering large-scale conservation outcomes in the expanding biofuels sector.