spatial climate solutions lab
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Spatial planning that harmonizes climate change mitigation strategies and conservationOur lab's research aims to achieve two goals, often concurrently: 1) accelerating the sustainable and equitable deployment of climate change mitigations strategies and 2) habitat conservation. Given the land-intensiveness of multiple integral climate-solutions (wind power, solar power, transmission, bioenergy, reforestation), these two goals can often be at odds, but we believe that spatially-informed strategies and solutions can minimize environmental and social land use conflicts--and even identify synergistic relationships.
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Lab News Highlights
June 2024Awarded SEEDS4 grant on community perceptions of utility-scale solar
As part of a Department of Energy SEEDS 4 award, the Spatial Climate Solutions lab as part of the The 2035 Initiative joins a team of researchers, led by the Solar and Storage Industries Institute, to test and evaluate innovative community engagement practices used in large-scale solar project siting and permitting.
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Nov 2024Awarded grant on agrivoltaics in Washington state with collaborators TNC, American Farmland Trust, and WSU
UCSB (Riley Tinianov and Prof Wu) will lead the development of a coupled PV system and crop model to design agrivoltaic systems that optimize crop productivity and solar electricity generation for multiple farms in Washington.
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Feb 2024New paper published in Nature Comms on hydropower, wind, and solar development in Southern Africa
New paper published in Nature Communications on the costs and carbon benefits of developing wind, solar, and hydropower projects that have lower social and environmental impacts.
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"There's one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and this is the urgent threat of a changing climate"
- Barak Obama
"Human activities have already altered 70% of the Earth's land surface, degrading up to 40% of it."
