The clean energy transition needs land. Can it help restore it too?

What if the infrastructure needed to fight climate change could also help repair the land beneath it?At a UN desertification conference this week in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, experts at a side-event examined how renewable energy expansion can co-exist with land protection and restoration, spotlighting examples from around the world.To name a few, degraded mining land in South Africa has been repurposed for renewables, solar panels are being combined with vegetation, water harvesting and sand-control measures in China’s deserts and solar irrigation is helping farmers in India use the same land for food production and clean energy.The transition away from fossil fuels will require much more solar, wind and other renewable-energy infrastructure, with an emerging physical footprint that expects to see the 500,000 hectares currently used for renewable-energy projects reach three million hectares by 2032.Renewable-energy expansion is potentially “one of history’s largest land use transformations”, said Julian Blanc, head of the Biodiversity and Land Branch at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).“The real question is no longer whether renewable energy is going to expand or not. It is, and th...