Suchergebnisse

open access via Elsevier agreement Thanks are due to Professor Andrew Lovett and his team at UEA, Scottish Natural Heritage, the James Hutton Institute, and the UK government for providing the GIS datasets interpreted in this study. This work was funded by the ADVENT project funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NE/M019691/1) and ADVANCES funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NE/M019691/1) and EPSRC funded UKERC-4. This work contribute to the RETINA project (NE/V003240/1). ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

Thanks are due to Scottish Natural Heritage, the James Hutton Institute, and the UK government for providing the GIS datasets interpreted in this study. This work was made possible by the ADVENT project funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NE/M019691/1), ADVANCES funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NE/M019691/1) and UKERC (UK Energy Research Centre) Phase 4 research programme funded by UK Research and Innovation (The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) (EP/S029575/1). CRediT authorship contribution statement A. Shepherd: Editing, formatting, updates & recalculation, corresponding author. S. Roberts: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Review response. G. Sünnenberg: Conceptualization, Data provision. A. Lovett: Conceptualization, Method, Data provision. A.F.S. Hastings: Funding, Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Data curation, Review response. ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

The OPTIMISC project received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement No. 289159. In addition, the study was partly supported by a grant from the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg (funding code: 7533-10-5-70) as part of the BBW ForWerts Graduate Programme. We are grateful to Nicole Gaudet for editing the manuscript. ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

Increased deployment of renewable energy can contribute towards mitigating climate change and improving air quality, wealth and development. However, renewable energy technologies are not free of environmental impacts; thus, it is important to identify opportunities and potential threats from the expansion of renewable energy deployment. Currently, there is no cross-national comprehensive analysis linking renewable energy potential simultaneously to socio-economic and political factors and biodiversity priority locations. Here, we quantify the relationship between the fraction of land-based renewable energy (including solar photovoltaic, wind and bioenergy) potential available outside the top biodiversity areas (i.e. outside the highest ranked 30% priority areas for biodiversity conservation) within each country, with selected socio-economic and geopolitical factors as well as biodiversity assets. We do so for two scenarios that identify priority areas for biodiversity conservation alternatively in a globally coordinated manner vs. separately for individual countries. We show that very different opportunities and challenges emerge if the priority areas for biodiversity protection are identified globally or designated nationally. In the former scenario, potential for solar, wind and bioenergy outside the top biodiversity areas is highest in developing countries, in sparsely populated countries and in countries of low biodiversity potential but with high air pollution mortality. Conversely, when priority areas for biodiversity protection are designated nationally, renewable energy potential outside the top biodiversity areas is highest in countries with good governance but also in countries with high biodiversity potential and population density. Overall, these results identify both clear opportunities but also risks that should be considered carefully when making decisions about renewable energy policies. ; Peer reviewed

Acknowledgements This work was supported by UKERC, Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) award NE/H013237/1, by the European Union (GHG-Europe project), BBSRC (GIANT-LINK project), by NERC as part of the Carbo-BioCrop project (Grant reference number: NE/H010742/1), by the MAGLUE project (Grant reference number: EP/M013200/1), Addressing valuation of energy and nature together (ADVENT) (Grant reference number: NE/M019713/1) and by the EPSRC SUPERGEN Bioenergy projects (Grant reference number: EP/K036734/1). ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

The research work has been carried out as a part of OPTIMISC project, which received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 289159. Authors would like to acknowledge all project partners for managing field trials at each site and providing samples. The authors wish to thank Dr. Jens Möhring for his support during the statistical analysis. Particular thanks go to the staff of the experimental station, Ihinger Hof, especially Thomas Truckses for providing help during field measurements and sample collection. The chemical analysis was supported by Dagmar Mezger and Martin Zahner. The manuscript was edited by Nicole Gaudet. ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

To achieve the UK Government's aim of expansion in the growth of perennial energy crops requires farmers to select these crops in preference to conventional rotations. Existing studies estimating the total potential resource have either only simplistically considered the farmer decision-making and opportunity costs, for example using an estimate of annual land rental charge; or have not considered spatial variability, for example using representative farm types. This paper attempts to apply a farm-scale modelling approach with spatially specific data to improve understanding of potential perennial energy crop supply. The model main inputs are yield maps for the perennial energy crops, Miscanthus and willow grown as short-rotation coppice (SRC), and regional yields for conventional crops. These are used to configure location specific farm-scale models, which optimize for profit maximization with risk aversion. Areas that are unsuitable or unavailable for energy crops, due to environmental or social factors, are constrained from selection. The results are maps of economic supply, assuming a homogenous farm-gate price, allowing supply cost curves for the UK market to be derived. The results show a high degree of regional variation in supply, with different patterns for each energy crop. Using estimates of yields under climate change scenarios suggests that Miscanthus supply may increase under future climates while the opposite effect is suggested for SRC willow. The results suggest that SRC willow is only likely to able to supply a small proportion of the anticipated perennial energy crop target, without increases in market prices. Miscanthus appears to have greater scope for supply, and its dominance may be amplified over time by the effects of climate change. Finally, the relationship to the demand side of the market is discussed, and work is proposed to investigate the factors impacting how the market as a whole may develop.

To achieve the UK Government's aim of expansion in the growth of perennial energy crops requires farmers to select these crops in preference to conventional rotations. Existing studies estimating the total potential resource have either only simplistically considered the farmer decision-making and opportunity costs, for example using an estimate of annual land rental charge; or have not considered spatial variability, for example using representative farm types. This paper attempts to apply a farm-scale modelling approach with spatially specific data to improve understanding of potential perennial energy crop supply. The model main inputs are yield maps for the perennial energy crops, Miscanthus and willow grown as short-rotation coppice (SRC), and regional yields for conventional crops. These are used to configure location specific farm-scale models, which optimize for profit maximization with risk aversion. Areas that are unsuitable or unavailable for energy crops, due to environmental or social factors, are constrained from selection. The results are maps of economic supply, assuming a homogenous farm-gate price, allowing supply cost curves for the UK market to be derived. The results show a high degree of regional variation in supply, with different patterns for each energy crop. Using estimates of yields under climate change scenarios suggests that Miscanthus supply may increase under future climates while the opposite effect is suggested for SRC willow. The results suggest that SRC willow is only likely to able to supply a small proportion of the anticipated perennial energy crop target, without increases in market prices. Miscanthus appears to have greater scope for supply, and its dominance may be amplified over time by the effects of climate change. Finally, the relationship to the demand side of the market is discussed, and work is proposed to investigate the factors impacting how the market as a whole may develop.

The OPTIMISC project received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 289159. ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The OPTIMISC project received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 289159. We are grateful to Nicole Gaudet for editing the manuscript. ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF