Peer-reviewed paper published: Renewable energy and ecosystem services
In early January, a new peer-reviewed paper by members of the NRGlab has been published (online first). The paper by Paolo Picchi and Sven Stremke et al. entitled Advancing the relationship between renewable energy and ecosystem services for landscape planning and design: A literature review was published by the journal of Ecosystem Services. The paper is a result of Paolo’s research exchange at Wageningen University supported by Erasmus Plus, University of Trento and the DEESD project.
Abstract: The transition to a low carbon future is starting to affect landscapes around the world. In order for this landscape transformation to be sustainable, renewable energy technologies should not cause critical trade-offs between the provision of energy and that of other ecosystem services such as food production. This literature review advances the body of knowledge on sustainable energy transition with special focus on ecosystem services-based approaches and methods. Two key issues emerge from this review: only one sixth of the published applications on the relation between renewable energy and landscape make use of the ecosystem service framework. Secondly, the applications that do address ecosystem services for landscape planning and design lack efficient methods and spatial reference systems that accommodate both cultural and regulating ecosystem services. Future research efforts should be directed to further advancing the spatial reference systems, the use of participatory mapping and landscape visualizations tools for cultural ecosystem services and the elaboration of landscape design principles.
Reference: Picchi, P., Van Lierop, M., Geneletti, D., Stremke, S. (2019) Advancing the relationship between renewable energy and ecosystem services for landscape planning and design: A literature review, Ecosystem Services, 35, 241–259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2018.12.010
Figure: Illustration of the spatial information that different spatial reference systems support; “participatory mapping” is a tool that can be combined with each spatial reference system (Picchi et al. 2019).