Approximately 85% of Australian plant species are endemic. In 2026, IRENA, CREEI, and the IUCN published a report on the local environmental effects of large-scale photovoltaic plants, documenting a counterintuitive effect: in certain scenarios and for certain technologies, notably wind energy studied in Switzerland, strict avoidance can increase total impact if alternative sites are less productive. Excluding the most productive sites in favor of less efficient areas forces a multiplication of installations to reach the same energy output. A greater number of installations fragments more habitat. To deliver the same gigawatt to the grid, a less efficient location can require more additional surface area.
The Essentials
- Strict avoidance of sensitive areas for renewable installations can increase cumulative impact on biodiversity if alternative sites are less efficient and require more infrastructure to produce the same energy.
- Australia is home to approximately 85% of endemic plant species, making it a critical case study for this dilemma.
- The IUCN published a technical note in 2024 on spatial planning for wind and solar, proposing to simultaneously optimize location and efficiency, rather than apply uniform exclusion rules.
- This dilemma goes beyond ecology: it requires explicit political trade-off on acceptable losses, which neither financial tools nor technical standards alone can resolve.
- Before the renewable deployment wave of 2027–2030, models tested in Oceania could be transferred to major continental biodiversity hotspots, if national authorization procedures integrate cumulative impact assessment rather than site-by-site evaluation.
Strict Avoidance: A Reasonable Intuition That Can Backfire
Australia, where energy transition is accelerating in one of the world’s most concentrated biodiversity hotspots, is where this dilemma is being documented in real time and where responses are beginning to be tested.
The idea is seductive in its logic. To protect areas of high ecological value, they are banned from wind turbines and solar panels. Developers look elsewhere. Sensitive biodiversity remains intact on these sites.
The problem is that this reasoning stops at the level of the individual site. Spatial planning approaches expand it to system scale. A solar farm excluded from a site with strong solar irradiance potential moves to a less sunny, less productive area. In the western United States, a high-renewables scenario requires more than 30% additional surface area compared with a baseline scenario. This additional surface fragments habitats that may not have been classified as “sensitive” under exclusion criteria, but which nonetheless host endemic species, migration corridors, and minimally disturbed soils.
Cumulative impact then exceeds what would have been produced by a better-located but less-avoided installation. The mechanism is presented by a Swiss case study, then in preprint, documenting how exclusion can increase overall spatial impact in certain wind scenarios when alternative sites are significantly less productive.
This finding does not argue for abandoning protections. It argues for rethinking them at the right scale.
88% Endemism: Why Australia Is the Right Case
Australia is not one case among many. Its long-standing geographic isolation has produced a flora found nowhere else at this proportion: approximately 85% of Australian plant species are endemic to the continent. When habitat is fragmented there, there is no refuge population a few borders away. The loss is permanent.
This context makes the trade-off between energy transition and biodiversity particularly acute. Australia has committed to achieving 82% renewable electricity by 2030, compared with less than 40% today. The planned deployment is massive. On a territory so ecologically irreplaceable, every siting decision—the choice of where to place an installation—has consequences that do not easily offset each other.
The ongoing renewable deployment already represents a significant spatial footprint. And this deployment will increase rapidly. It is precisely this pressure that makes integrated spatial planning relevant: it was designed to manage rapid deployment in an environment of high irreplaceable value, not for situations where planning time is long and local stakes limited.
The link with other conservation issues in marine or land-based Oceania is real. When a reef regains life but lacks a guardian, the lesson is the same: localized protection, without overall governance, is not enough to preserve ecological systems.
Concrete Contributions of the IUCN-CREEI Framework
The IUCN and the China Renewable Energy Engineering Institute signed a memorandum of understanding on January 11, 2025, in Abu Dhabi for cooperation on research and spatial planning tools for renewable energy.
The result is a map of trade-offs. Some areas with high solar or wind potential present low or zero biodiversity value: they become priorities. Others combine strong potential and high ecological value: they require explicit trade-off. Still others offer little of either: they naturally drop out of the calculation.
This approach includes environmental assessments at multiple levels: project, strategic, and cumulative. Depending on the applicable regime, the developer may need to assess environmental impacts and alternatives. It makes trade-offs visible and comparable. Decision-makers see exactly how much additional habitat is fragmented depending on which spatial configuration they choose.
This visibility is precisely what is lacking in current procedures, where environmental impact assessments are conducted site by site, without an overall vision of the energy system under construction.
The Trade-Off That Neither Market nor Standards Can Make Alone
A competing reading deserves examination. A liberal economist working in the tradition of Jean Tirole on market design or Cécile Philippe on the real cost of energy policies would raise a legitimate objection: a centralized administrative procedure would produce better results than a correctly priced market.
If biodiversity footprint were correctly valued, through a tax, a tradeable permit, or a requirement to purchase biodiversity credits, developers would spontaneously have an interest in maximizing their energy efficiency per unit of surface area. They would choose the most efficient sites, not because they are required to, but because each additional hectare of habitat would cost them. The optimization that the IUCN-CREEI framework seeks to produce through planning would emerge from economic calculation.
The argument is serious. But it faces two limits that Australian data make visible. The first: biodiversity credit markets remain immature, illiquid, and their ecological accounting is contested. They do not value habitat fragmented in a migration corridor the same way they value bare soil with no ecological value, even though both enter the same compensation calculation. The second limit is deeper: some biodiversity losses are irreversible.
The fact that 85% of Australian plant species are endemic means that some lost species will be found nowhere else. No market, however well designed, compensates for the disappearance of a unique species. The choice to preserve or sacrifice certain areas is a value trade-off, distinct from economic calculation.
Anaïs Voy-Gillis emphasizes this in Industrial Transition: From National Narrative to Strategic Territories at the French national scale: no financial tool alone resolves the conflict between energy sovereignty and preservation of life. An explicit democratic choice about acceptable losses is necessary. Australia illustrates this at continental scale. The spatially framed framework provides the material for deciding—maps, figures, comparisons—without substituting a ready-made answer for deliberation.
The same tension is found in Europe: Nature in Europe: Regulatory Ambition Exceeds Available Budget by 37 Billion shows that setting protection targets without the means to achieve them produces a symmetric impasse.
Before 2030: Two Trajectories, One Window
The renewable deployment wave planned between 2027 and 2030 will affect several countries hosting continental biodiversity hotspots. These countries can combine integrated spatial planning, assessment of ecological sensitivities, and targeted exclusions rather than uniformly apply strict exclusion rules inherited from current procedures.
The study compares five levels of biodiversity protection depending on the scenario chosen. The reference scenario retains existing exclusions while integrating technical-economic and environmental planning. Deployment concentrates on less efficient sites and involves trade-offs between biodiversity protection, project location, resource quality, costs, and transport infrastructure. Already-excluded zones cover only part of threatened species distributions, and unclassified habitats experience increased fragmentation through multiplication of infrastructure.
In the second trajectory, approaches developed in Australia and Pacific island nations are adapted for major continental hotspots. Installations are selected based on energy potential and a spatial biodiversity risk indicator; overall impact is then assessed for the selected configuration. Losses remain real—no large-scale energy transition scenario escapes a spatial footprint—but they are minimized and, above all, deliberately chosen.
Two collective needs condition the second trajectory. First, irreplaceable biodiversity zones must be mapped before any massive deployment. Mapping exists at global scale, but detailed and homogeneous national data remain incomplete in many countries. Some authorization procedures already require environmental assessments at the planning or project stage, but requirements vary by jurisdiction. Next, a common method is needed to compare biodiversity impact of different spatial configurations, an equivalent of carbon accounting, but for life’s footprint.
Two signals will allow measurement of which trajectory prevails. The first: the number of countries that have integrated cumulative biodiversity impact assessment into their national renewable authorization procedure—an assessment at deployment project scale, not site by site. The second: observed differences in biodiversity footprint between countries applying spatially targeted siting and those maintaining strict avoidance.
The window is short. Projects launched now will reach commissioning in the years that follow. Location decisions are being made now in authorization procedures that, for several of them, do not yet know how to calculate cumulative impact.
Pacific Island States, First to Test This Model
Pacific island nations present an additional constraint that continental Australia does not: space is physically limited. On an island of a few hundred square kilometers, the compromise between energy efficiency and habitat is not theoretical. It is immediate and visible.
This is precisely why island nations are testing spatially targeted siting approaches. The SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute) is monitoring several of these experiments in the Pacific as part of its work on ocean governance. Initial feedback indicates that integrated spatial planning clarifies trade-offs upstream, which can streamline authorization procedures by reducing installation-by-installation contestation.
This model is exportable. But its transfer to large countries with continental hotspots requires adaptation: deployment volumes are incomparable, actors are more numerous, and local political interests complicate centralized planning. Financing this transfer, through a dedicated operational fund before 2027, as the IUCN-CREEI architecture suggests, remains to be built.
The main difficulty is political: some countries facing the 2027–2030 deployment wave have the institutional capacity and political will necessary to plan before deploying; others do not. Australia has embarked on this approach.
Sources
- Wiley / IUCN / SEI, “Spatial planning framework for renewable energy siting in biodiversity hotspots” (2026), https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ppp3.70082
- Anaïs Voy-Gillis, Hugo Lambert, Tristan Méneret, Industrial Transition: From National Narrative to Strategic Territories, Institut Terram, https://institut-terram.org/publications/transition-industrielle-du-recit-national-aux-territoires-strateges/
- IUCN, Conservation report 2026 (cited in the IUCN-CREEI framework)
- SEI (Stockholm Environment Institute), Ocean governance and Pacific island energy transitions (2026)
- Nature Conservancy, Renewable energy siting guidance (method reference)
