Trade-off scenarios in energy transition: The impact of social preferences and ecosystem services

Abstract

The siting of large energy facilities is a major challenge in countries where environmental and landscape issues related to outdoor recreation, place attachment, or tourism are publicly discussed, as the choice of the "optimal" location always depends on perspective. To allow informed decisions by policy makers, landscape research should provide data on current and potential future land use, public perceptions of landscapes and energy infrastructure etc. Decision support tools can convey this information to end users and help them to mimic tradeoffs between landscape issues and renewable energy development. However, these trade-offs often focus on techno-economic aspects and ignore environmental and social aspects. In this presentation, an optimization technique (MARXAN) is applied to mimic siting of renewable energy in Switzerland. Each potential energy site has costs in terms of ecosystem services and social preferences. MARXAN optimizes the selection of these sites to produce a given energy output at the lowest cost. It is shown that when focusing on the (often) common techno-economic approach, ecological costs peak while social costs are moderate compared to ecologically and socially oriented siting strategies. When siting incorporates ecosystem service costs, both spatial stress (claimed square kilometers of landscape for renewable energy infrastructure development) and social impacts peak, and when social costs are incorporated, both spatial and ecosystem service impacts turn out to be quite moderate. The results highlight the implications of a potential paradigm shift by showing the impact of integrating ecological and social information to provide informed decision support.