Abstract
Islands are increasingly positioned at the forefront of renewable energy transitions. They host high biodiversity, limited land availability, and growing wind-energy development, creating structural tensions between decarbonization and conservation. Yet the spatial distribution of renewable energy infrastructure across island systems remains poorly quantified. This study provides a distribution-sensitive assessment of terrestrial wind-energy development across Greek islands by examining scaling relationships, spatial intensity, inequality, spatial clustering, and licensing outcomes. We distinguish between absolute deployment metrics (installed capacity and total project footprint) and relative spatial intensity (normalized by island area). Quantile regression characterizes heterogeneous scaling relationships, while Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients quantify inequality in wind-energy pressure. Installation-level models evaluate how overlap with Natura 2000 protected areas relates to licensing outcomes. Wind capacity increases with island area, but scaling differs across the deployment distribution, with larger islands disproportionately defining the upper deployment frontier. Wind potential constrains deployment at the lower and upper tails but does not explain median patterns. Total project footprint declines with increasing Natura coverage, whereas footprint intensity rises, indicating spatial compression as infrastructure becomes concentrated within the remaining non-protected land. Inequality metrics reveal strong concentration of wind-energy pressure, and spatial autocorrelation analyses indicate significant geographic clustering of deployment intensity. Natura overlap was associated with licensing outcomes in unadjusted models, but was not a significant predictor after accounting for application year and project footprint. The findings demonstrate that wind energy projects in islands are shaped by conservation coverage and distributional dynamics alongside resource availability. More broadly, they show that where wind-energy development is concentrated may be as important as how much is installed, highlighting the value of spatial intensity, inequality, and distributional metrics for revealing conservation pressures overlooked by aggregate capacity alone. Incorporating these indicators into Environmental Impact Assessment and Strategic Environmental Assessment can improve cumulative, archipelago-scale planning in conservation-sensitive contexts.