Promoting a biodiversity-friendly energy transition through spatial decision support: Insights from the Swiss SolarWind Explorer

Expanding renewable energy production and halting biodiversity loss are both recognized as interests of national importance in Switzerland. The Federal Act on Energy sets binding targets for renewable energy expansion, while the Swiss Biodiversity Strategy seeks to conserve ecosystems, species, and genetic diversity. These two objectives, combined with Switzerland’s unique landscapes, complex topography, and limited space for large-scale infrastructure, raise an urgent question: How can the energy transition proceed without compromising biodiversity and landscape quality? Addressing this question requires transparent, spatially explicit, and scientifically sound tools to assess trade-offs and synergies between renewable energy production and the conservation of biodiversity and landscapes.

The Swiss SolarWind Explorer is a web-based spatial decision-support tool co-created with stakeholders. It provides harmonized maps of key criteria for the expansion of open-field solar and wind energy, including energy potential, grid connection, accessibility, and legal restrictions. These criteria are presented alongside indicators of importance for biodiversity, landscape quality, public acceptance, and conflicting land uses to avoid potential harm. One innovation is that importance for biodiversity is represented through not only protected areas, but also three novel spatial indicators that characterise each pixel’s contribution to minimising species extinction risk and sustaining ecological complementarity and connectivity.

Trough the Swiss SolarWind Explorer, users can visualise, weigh, and combine various criteria at 50 m resolution across Switzerland. These functionalities enable users to explore pixel-level suitability and constraints, identify low-conflict areas, and assess the impact of prioritising factors such as high energy potential or low distance to existing infrastructure. Detailed analyses of the integrated map layers help tackle complex questions, including: At what threshold does additional renewable energy deployment result in a disproportionate negative impact on biodiversity? How do different planning scenarios affect the geographic distribution of optimal, low-conflict areas across Switzerland?  

This contribution presents insights from using the Swiss SolarWind Explorer web-tool and further scientific analyses, revealing spatial patterns of conflicts and compatibility between renewable energy production and biodiversity conservation. It highlights how integrated, transparent, and scientifically robust spatial decision-support tools can guide a biodiversity-friendly energy transition in Switzerland.