Abstract
Offshore wind energy (OWE) is expected to grow as part of the efforts to transition to a low-carbon economy. Its environmental and social impacts should be comprehensively assessed to identify and mitigate potential adverse effects. For this purpose, developing an appropriate biodiversity baseline that considers the ecological complexity of target areas, a crucial pre-construction phase of environmental impact assessment (EIA), can benefit from Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) principles. Here, we review international guidance documents containing guidelines for performing biodiversity baseline assessments in OWE projects. We synthesize the guidelines and critically discuss their potentialities and limitations under an EBM perspective for the EIA process, proposing a conceptual approach applicable to OWE development. The reviewed documents recommended stakeholders’ involvement in selecting priority biodiversity components and point to the need for assessing cumulative impacts, which agrees with EBM principles. However, we note insufficient guidance to evaluate the synergism between OWE impacts and climate change effects in the baseline phase and scarce recommendations about assessing impacts on ecosystem functions and services. To overcome such limitations, we discuss strategies to perform a retrospective-analytical baseline study prioritizing integrative-paired assessments of ecological processes, rather than species-centered assessments. Designing regional ecosystem models to clarify the causal nexus between OWE projects, biodiversity, and ecosystem-level indicators is also a fundamental need to incorporate EBM principles into baseline studies. Therefore, our contribution can support a holistic baseline assessment for offshore wind projects toward an ecologically responsible energy transition.