Impacts of renewable energy on global biodiversity – an overlooked cost of climate change mitigation?

I oversee RSPBs international conservation science team who work on a wide range of projects from site based tropical forest conservation through flyways conservation to seabirds. I focus on land use / land cover change, site conservation and species ranges.

My research concerns the effects of human land use, climatic change and conservation management on populations of birds and other organisms. In particular, I attempt to measure and model the effects of agricultural development and management, disturbance, illegal killing, climatic change and conservation measures on the demography of bird populations. I then use the insights this provides to devise conservation programmes and strategies. With Andrew Balmford and Rosie Trevelyan, I am a founder and organiser of the annual Student Conference on Conservation Science in Cambridge which has been bringing early career-stage conservation scientists together since 2000.

I am Chief Scientist at BirdLife International where I lead a team who help to provide the scientific basis for the conservation programmes of the 115 Partners that form the BirdLife International Partnership. This includes assessing extinction risk for the world’s birds for the IUCN Red List, coordinating the standards and protocols for identifying and monitoring Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) globally, identifying key threats to birds and their habitats, determining the priority actions required (for species, sites, habitats and along flyways), understanding the how people depend upon the ecosystem services delivered by IBAs, developing biodiversity indicators based on bird data, and ensuring that sound science underpins BirdLife’s policy, advocacy and communications activities.

Tim is an ecologist, whose main interest is in understanding the impact of human activities on the ecological communities. He works on the PREDICTS project, and was also part of a team who built the first global mechanistic model of ecosystem structure and function, The Madingley Model. Tim studied Zoology and completed a PhD on Egyptian biodiversity at Nottingham University.

Aida Kowalska is the Global Policy Safeguards Officer at BirdLife International. Her work focuses on supporting the development and implementation of biodiversity safeguards in renewable energy developments. She works closely with International Financial Institutions and supports national BirdLife Partners’ engagement with governments and renewable energy developers to strengthen spatial planning and environmental impact assessment frameworks.

Jamie Carr is Programme Officer for the Climate Change Unit of IUCN’s Global Species Programme. Since 2009, Jamie has been working to co-ordinate assessments of climate change vulnerability of species across a broad range of taxonomic groups, with a view to informing the IUCN Red List’s assessment of extinction risk and contributing toward climate change adaptation strategies. He has made key contributions to developing the assessment approach used by IUCN to assess species vulnerability to climate change, and has worked with stakeholders and conservation practitioners to ensure understanding of vulnerability assessment outputs, and to determine ways that assessment results can feed into climate-smart, on-the-ground actions. 

Prof Crawford-Brown is Director of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Land Economy, and Emeritus Professor in Environmental Sciences and Policy at the University of North Carolina in the US. His research is primarily in environmental risk assessment and energy system analysis. This includes the costs and benefits of strategies to improve energy security and economic growth while improving human and ecosystem health, as well as uncertainty analysis performed in support of regulatory decisions. His role in the project is to provide assessments of the likely spatial growth and magnitude of renewable energy systems nationally and globally using the coupled energy-economy-environment models of 4CMR.