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, told the gathering that the expansion of renewables may prove to be one of the biggest land-use shifts in history. The real debate isn’t whether it happens, but whether it leaves ecosystems and communities better off once it does, he says.

Several countries are already updating land use to accommodate renewable energy infrastructure. Old mining sites in South Africa are being turned into renewable energy hubs. Farmers in India are pairing solar panels with irrigation, letting the same plot grow crops and generate electricity at once.

And across China’s deserts, solar farms are being combined with water harvesting and sand-control efforts to hold back the dunes. Smallholder farmers in India were initially reluctant to install panels, so a digital platform stepped in to map which parts of their land were best suited to solar.

An electronic payment system followed, allowing farmers to sell surplus power back to the grid, meaning irrigation pumps got power and farmers got extra income, all from the same square meter of dirt.

China’s deserts tell a similar story from a different angle. In the Taklamakan, solar-powered pumps irrigate vegetation that helps pin down sand along roadways. Further along in the Tengger Desert, panels reduce evaporation and wind at ground level, while shrubs anchor the sand. Water runoff from the panels is redirected to nearby plants, and some of that vegetation ends up feeding livestock or supporting honey production.

Even so, Muralee Thummarukudy of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification cautioned that location matters enormously. A solar farm that helps restore one landscape could damage another.

Experts pointed to Malawi’s Shire River Basin, where a cluster of hydropower plants has put combined strain on fisheries and communities downstream, as a reminder that even well-intentioned projects can add up to trouble.

The fix, several speakers argued, is to study a landscape’s water, wildlife and communities before picking a site, rather than after. UNEP is now planning to collect case studies from around the world to help other countries get the sequencing right.

If the same careful sequencing approach becomes the norm for all clean energy actors, including American Fusion Inc. (OTC: AMFN), the energy transition could become a transformative force that restores land and revitalizes it.

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