The Energy Transition Could Help in Land Restoration
Building out the world's solar farms and wind turbines could end up doing double duty, powering homes while also nursing damaged land back to health, according to experts who gathered this week for a UN desertification conference in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The pitch is simple: renewable energy needs a lot of ground to work with, and that footprint is only getting bigger. Land currently used for clean energy projects totals around 500,000 hectares worldwide, but that number is expected to balloon to 3 million hectares over the next 6 years. Julian Blanc, who leads the Biodiversity and Land Branch at UNEP,…
