We can enhance biodiversity and accelerate offshore wind at the same time
Offshore wind stands at the nexus of solutions for climate change and biodiversity loss.
Benj Sykes, Head of Environment, Consents & External Affairs
| Ørsted
Faster planning decisions don’t have to come at the expense of protecting our marine environment. We have the tools to do both, we just need to use them.
Onshore planning reform is often portrayed as ‘the builders versus the blockers’. In the marine environment, however, it is possible to deliver faster planning decisions in a way that protects and enhances biodiversity whilst enabling the accelerated build out of offshore wind that is essential to both to the UK’s energy security and to decarbonising the economy.
The current system for providing planning consent for offshore wind farms in England isn’t working: every single planning application for offshore windfarms made over the last five years has been delayed. Scotland and Wales, both of whom have a growing pipeline of offshore wind farms in the planning system, are going to experience the same issue without reforms.
However, with the right planning regime it is possible to provide the same level of environmental protection and also deliver the electricity infrastructure we need to provide energy security and drive economic growth.
One of the main problems has been a planning system that forces each development to find an individual like-for-like measure to compensate for the impact of that offshore wind farm on certain aspects of the marine environment. It would be so much more effective if governments took a strategic approach.
Instead of each offshore wind farm delivering its own solution, governments could use a system that pools their compensation needs and financial contributions and then spends the money on a larger-scale intervention that will have a greater positive impact across the marine environment.
Industry and the UK Government have been working for over a year to set up such a system in England via what’s called the ‘Marine Recovery Fund’. In Scotland there are similar discussions in train.
However, progress has been slow and if we are going to deliver more offshore wind over the next five years, we are going to need quicker and bolder decisions from governments. Given that the natural environment does not respect borders, it is also an area that would benefit from greater cooperation between the UK and devolved governments.
The other advantage of a Marine Recovery Fund style approach is that if we get new information indicating that there are higher priority actions to protect the marine environment, then the compensation fund can simply re-direct spending to address these new priorities.
More can be done to deepen our understanding of the marine environment and one of the most important actions that the UK and Devolved governments can take is to invest in more surveying and data collection to improve our picture of the health of our seas. As our understanding improves, we can direct spending to where it has the most impact, and a Marine Recovery Fund can do this without causing delays for projects in development.
Another change that needs to happen is a shift from an overly precautionary approach to a more balanced risk-based approach. Currently, planning bodies are making decisions based on worst-case scenarios. Instead, we should be moving to a system based on a reasonable level of precaution.
We cannot build all the offshore windfarms we need with 100% confidence that they will have absolutely no unforeseen negative impact on the environment. However, we can construct all these wind farms and have a high confidence of the most likely level of impact.
With a Marine Recovery Fund system we can also be confident that if new data comes along that shows a worse-than-expected impact, we can easily and quickly shift to enact different measures in light of this new information, leaving the overall marine environment either the same or even better off than it was before.
Finally, the other major advantage of a Marine Recovery Fund is that in the long run it can be used not only to provide compensation for the impacts of offshore wind, but it can also be used to provide additional positive impacts to the marine environment (including what’s known as ‘marine net gain’). Offshore wind developers, other users of the sea, or governments, can all make additional payments to create a fund with greater impact to help our marine environment, degraded over decades of human activity, to recover.
There is a dual crisis facing the marine environment, of biodiversity loss and climate change. Offshore wind sits at the nexus of these two challenges: as a source of renewable power, it has a vital role to play in the global transition to green energy. But that must not – and does not need to - come at the expense of marine biodiversity.
The governments across the UK have the tools that they need to accelerate the deployment of offshore wind whilst continuing to protect the marine environment. We just need to choose to use them.
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