Industrial-scale renewable energy generation facilities can have sizable footprints and therefore significant impact on the conservation values of a landscape. Solar Energy Development in the Western Mojave DesertĬameron, D., S. The authors discuss how their findings influenced the permanent protection of 6.5 million acres through California’s Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan. These analyses demonstrated that California could meet energy production goals without developing areas most important for biodiversity. The authors discuss their wall-to-wall assessment of conservation values across the 32-million-acre Mojave Desert, and their estimation of how much solar energy could be developed on previously-disturbed lands. This book chapter discusses how California's greenhouse gas emission reduction goals spurred solar development in the Mojave Desert-development that could have negative impacts if poorly sited. Solar Energy Development and Regional Conservation Planningĭ.R. In addition, the Executive Summary provides an overview of the analysis, key findings and policy recommendations from The Nature Conservancy. This report assesses the potential trade-offs associated with renewable energy build-out by evaluating the land and water use implications and cost of a range of potential 2030 renewable energy scenarios. Integrating ecological data into long-term energy planning is critical to meet both California’s long term energy and conservation goals. The Nature Conservancy: Erica Brand, Laura Crane, Dick Cameron, Energy and Environmental Economics: Grace C. Integrating Land Conservation and Renewable Energy Goals in CA: A study of costs and impacts using the optimal renewable energy build-out model The authors identify 2.5 million acres of current agricultural lands that have high potential for restoration, 14% of which was fallowed at least once during the most recent drought. In this assessment, The Nature Conservancy introduces the concept of strategic land retirement and restoration, an approach which seeks to help recover San Joaquin Valley threatened and endangered species by restoring agricultural land that is suitable as habitat and under threat of retirement.
Scott Butterfield, Rodd Kelsey, Abigail Hart, Tanushree Biswas, Mark Kramer, Dick Cameron, Laura Crane, Erica BrandĬalifornia's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) established a framework for sustainable, local groundwater management. SGMA requires groundwater-dependent regions to halt overdraft and bring basins into balanced levels of pumping and recharge. As a result, agricultural land retirement is on the rise in the San Joaquin Valley, California’s largest agricultural region and home to the state's highest concentration of threatened and endangered species. Identification of potentially suitable habitat for strategic land retirement and restoration in the San Joaquin Desert The resulting maps better support land use decisions, such as how best to site and mitigate the impacts of renewable energy development. The Mojave Desert Ecoregional Assessment represents an important advance in such planning, because of how its output characterized not just areas of high conservation value, but how conservation values distributed and graded across the whole of the planning area. Regional conservation planning is critical to inform land and resource use decisions. Mackenzie, Kirk Klausmeyer, Scott Morrison Parker, James Moore, Brian Cohen, Laura Crane, Bill Christian, Dick Cameron, Jason B.
Region x laura full#
Visit Science for Conservation for a full list.
0 kommentar(er)
