Onshore wind power is increasingly expanding to meet global and national goals to increase renewable, clean, and fossil-free energy production. In many countries and regions, however, historical and current land use is extensive, and the expansion of wind power has to be well-tuned to avoid risking irreversible legacy losses of existing and traditional land uses, landscape values, and cultures. Hence, assessments of the siting premises of current and forecasted expansion of wind power are strongly needed as a basis for sustainable planning. We present a study from alpine to temperate biomes in Sweden, where an ambitious onshore wind power expansion strategy has been put in place and will result in Swedish landscapes that are typified by wind power. We explored the existing legal framework—i.e., the national interest for wind power according to the Swedish Environmental Code—concerning the spatial interaction with other national interests for nature conservation, landscape values, and other land uses, and the land cover, landowner, and formally protected areas distribution within wind power sites and in their proximity. We found that the national interest framework does not provide sufficient guidance for locating wind power to avoid spatial overlap with conflicting interests and values. Furthermore, our analysis revealed that wind power is located mainly in forest-dominated landscapes, and on lands where private forest companies are the dominant owners but where the proportion of public and non-industrial private ownership increases in the near surroundings. Finally, we found that large areas of formally protected areas are within the proximate areas influenced by wind power. As an extensive onshore wind power expansion is already going on, and an even more extensive expansion is projected, the ways forward toward a sustainable wind power expansion calls for integrated landscape planning approaches that are based on comprehensive assessments of existing interests and values.

The post Wind power distribution across subalpine, boreal, and temperate landscapes first appeared on Ecology & Society.

陆上风电不断扩大，以满足全球和国家增加可再生、清洁和无化石能源生产的目标。然而，在许多国家和地区，历史和当前的土地利用是广泛的，风电的扩张必须进行精心调整，以避免现有和传统土地利用、景观价值和文化遭受不可逆转的遗留损失的风险。因此，迫切需要对当前和预测的风电扩张的选址进行评估，作为可持续规划的基础。我们提出了一项从瑞典高山到温带生物群落的研究，其中雄心勃勃的陆上风力发电扩张战略已经到位，并将产生以风力发电为代表的瑞典景观。我们探讨了现有的法律框架，即根据瑞典环境法典规定的风电国家利益，涉及自然保护、景观价值和其他土地利用等其他国家利益的空间相互作用，以及土地覆盖、土地所有者和正式保护区分布在风电场及其附近。我们发现，国家利益框架没有为风电选址提供足够的指导，以避免利益和价值观冲突的空间重叠。此外，我们的分析表明，风电主要位于森林为主的地区，以及私营林业公司为主要所有者但附近地区公有制和非工业私有制比例增加的土地上。最后，我们发现大面积的正式保护区位于受风电影响的邻近区域内。由于大规模的陆上风电扩张已经在进行，并且预计将进行更广泛的扩张，因此可持续风电扩张的前进道路需要基于对现有利益和价值的综合评估的综合景观规划方法。

亚高山、北方和温带地区的后风能分布首次出现在《生态与社会》杂志上。