Abstract
Offshore wind is central to the UK's transition to clean energy. But consenting new developments depends on assessing their potential impacts on protected seabird populations — and for two decades, assessments have been hampered by significant uncertainty about how far seabirds actually redistribute in response to a wind farm (e.g., London Array Phase 2 and East Anglia One North for Red-throated Diver). When regulators cannot be confident in the underlying displacement rate, they must take the precautionary route, which increases both the cost and the consenting risk of new projects.
ImpUDis was established by ORJIP Offshore Wind to address this uncertainty head-on. Over four work packages, the project delivered: a review of the available evidence base; a formal, reproducible guidance framework for estimating redistribution; a real-world test of that framework using data from eight UK offshore wind farms; and a stakeholder workshop to validate methods and findings with regulators, industry and conservation bodies.
This briefing is a focused summary of the usefulness of what the project has produced, with some focus on the outputs from independent reviews of WP1 and WP2/WP3. The full technical findings sit in the main final report; the purpose here is to set out, in balanced terms, what ImpUDis delivers, where it can be put to work, what value it is expected to generate, and what has to happen next for that value to be realised in practice.