Trade-offs and synergies between renewable energy policies and sustai...

Climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts rank high among environmental policy objectives to bring about an energy transition towards renewable sources of energy. The European Union, for example, with its “Green Deal”, wants to transform Europe into the first climate-neutral continent. The “Green Deal” is also the Commission’s plan to make the EU’s economy sustainable by 2050. Other major global economies have already announced similar long-term objectives.

The objective of this paper is to analyse synergies and trade-offs between efforts to achieve the renewable energy-related sustainable development goal (SDG7) and delivery of the 2030 Agenda as a whole. Synergies include reduced impacts from climate change; improved air quality and human health; water conservation (for example from reduced water evaporation from floating solar); increased agricultural yields of shade-tolerant crops; and coastal protection from flooding and erosion by wave energy installations; Trade-offs comprise increased mining of rare earth metals; reduced local land rights; increased threats to cultural heritage as a result of mining; increased greenhouse gas emissions from land use change; fork – feed – fuel  trade-off associated with agro-fuel production; and reduced biodiversity resulting from land use change. Therefore, an energy transition involves much more than replacing fossil fuels by renewable ones because any form of energy provision is associated with a variety of social and environmental co-impacts. We point to the necessity of more holistic energy planning that balances trade-offs and synergies among and within the SDGs. This is a daunting task, also because of the near impossibility of constructing societal indifference curves.