Don't forget your environmental feasibility study

It seems that the wind energy sector is moving after the wind auction held last January 2016. The award of 700 MW of wind and biomass energy in the first renewable energy auction after the green moratorium, has caused wind companies to move a token. Experience tells us that this first movement is not (sometimes) what it should be in this type of project (and in all the others), since we are convinced that one of the first jobs to be done must be the environmental feasibility study.

At Ideas MedioAmbiental we are aware of this, and that is why we have been carrying out environmental feasibility studies for our clients for many years, and not only in the wind energy sector, but also in the rest of the energy, civil, oil & gas, mining, agroforestry and livestock sectors,... In most cases, these environmental feasibility studies improve decision-making and result in considerable savings in time, money and why not, prior to any environmental procedure before the competent administration. In this post, we want to succinctly explain to you how we carry out these previous environmental feasibility studies for wind farms, power lines, roads, quarries, loans, management plans,...

First of all the developer lets us know the location of his project, so he can provide us with a basic plan if he works in his possession. If you do not have such a plan (which can even be positive because it indicates that the environmental feasibility study is the first step taken), we proceed to georeference the different ideas or alternatives for the location of the project, with the support of the developer or future designer.

Known the location, the second step of an Environmental Feasibility Study is to proceed to incorporate the generated project cartography into a Geographic Information System and we analyze the presence of “conservation areas” or “protected areas” in the territory. “Protected areas” are acquired through official cartographic servers and our own cartography developed from the data acquired in our years of work.

In the analysis of conservation areas we include the available cartography referring to the following protected figures and/or conservation areas, such as:

• Protected areas: Protected Natural Areas (ENP); National Parks, Protected Natural Areas, Natural Parks, Nature Reserves, Microreserves, Natural Monuments, River Reserves, Protected Landscapes, Natural Areas, Natural Resource Management Plans, etc. and Sensitive Areas: LICs and ZECs, Critical Areas derived from Conservation Plans for threatened species, Wildlife Refuges, etc.

• Other protection figures: Habitats and geomorphological elements, Wetlands included in the RAMSAR Convention, Spanish Inventory of Wetlands (IEZH), Areas of Importance to Birds (IBAs), andetc.

Through our own GIS application, which we internally call “GISHuesos”, we also create a assessment and characterization of vertebrate fauna based on the Spanish Inventory of Terrestrial Species Database and applying to this Combined Indices (IC) who value the importance of wildlife communities based on their distribution, rarity and degree of conservation and whose calculations are carried out following the expressions proposed by King Benayas and De la Montaña (2003), in which three variables are combined for the assessment of the grid: species richness, rarity at the regional level, and vulnerability according to IUCN criteria for Spain.

After studying vertebrates, we conducted a study on the importance of analysis areas for steppe birds using values obtained by Traba et al. (2007), which are defined by combining variables of species richness, richness of rare species, rarity indices, threat category at national, European and global levels, and the use of combined indices to group all factors (for more details see Traba et al. 2007).

Finally, we analyze the presence of other elements of interest, depending on the type of project and the available data, highlighting the analysis of other nearby projects of a similar nature, urban regulations, elements of heritage or cultural interest (archaeological sites), livestock routes, Public Utility Forests, etc.

After the analysis, we prepare the corresponding report with environmental mapping included, which will be the basis for developers and designers to select the best location for their project, thus minimizing costs, time and headaches.