Abstract
A key aim of this guidance is to reframe cumulative impact assessments (CIA) to help support biodiversity conservation and the achievement of global biodiversity goals (alongside climate and other societal development goals). This guidance is focused on biodiversity and wind and solar development, and is aimed primarily at government planners and project developers. However, since it is designed to help tackle some of the existing challenges of CIA, there is potentially broader applicability. It complements existing guidance on CIA by:
- Outlining pragmatic and scalable approaches to implementation of CIA by government planners responsible for the renewable energy transition, and by wind and solar energy project developers, that:
- are aligned with existing good practice (such as the mitigation hierarchy), whilst recognising that the timeframe to meet global and national climate targets is short;
- show how the requirement for individual developers to assess multiple other projects or activities can be avoided; and
- show how CIA can be better integrated into project-level environmetal and social impact assessment (ESIA), and what developers can do when there is not a government-level CIA to draw on.
- facilitating an ‘entry point’ for government-led CIA, showing how CIA can be approached even in data-poor contexts where the available biodiversity baseline information remains limited, especially where regulatory requirements are still emerging, and/or resources and capacity are limited (again recognising the urgency with respect to the transition);
- signposting emerging technical methods which show promise for improving CIA in wind and solar contexts, which governments and project developers may consider trialling or improving further.
- summarising the key biodiversity features where cumulative impact are likely to have the greatest effect, and so likely to be a focus of a CIA for wind and solar development and transmission infrastructure; and
- highlighting priority areas that still need improvement either through technical development or regional- or sector-scale collaboration.
The document outlines approaches for:
- government-led CIA: an approach for government planners to carry out at the appropriate strategic (e.g. national or regional) scale.
- project-level CIA: approaches for developers of wind and solar projects and associated infrastructure to undertake at the individual project level – one when there is a government-led CIA available to draw on, and a fallback approach when there is not.
These two scales are intrinsically linked. Ideally, the government-led CIA provides the framework within which project-level CIA is implemented. As part of this, government can establish guiding principles and minimum standards for CIA, including requirements for stakeholder engagement, technical methods, and data sharing between projects. Project level CIA, can then help fill any gaps in government-led CIA, leading to incremental improvements in it.
Lenders and investors could also benefit from the information and practical approaches described, as a potentially useful complement to the existing standards and guidance of financial institutions (depending on the specific project situation), or as part of broader enabling programmes to promote the renewable energy transition, supported by development finance institutions.
The approach to each step is detailed in the guidance herein, summarised as follows:
- Set the spatial and temporal scales of CIA.
- Identify valued environmental components (VECs) – the environmental and social
attributes considered to be important in assessing risks – and trends in these VECs at
an appropriate spatial scale. - Determine VEC conservation targets and impact thresholds.
- Define an approach to apportioning allowable impacts on VECs.