World Bank in Planning for Nature Safe Offshore Wind Development

Project purpose

The World Bank Group Offshore Wind Development Program is dedicated to accelerating the uptake of offshore wind in emerging markets. It is a joint initiative of the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). The Program supports emerging market countries to include offshore wind in sector policies and strategies. A key mechanism for this is knowledge sharing. 

Offshore wind offers an abundant, reliable, and local source of clean electricity, but without careful planning, the installation of offshore wind farms can lead to negative impacts on biodiversity and marine ecosystems, and the livelihoods and well-being of coastal communities. Hence, the World Bank Group identified the need for guidance to support early planning that can help avoid and minimise impacts on biodiversity and social attributes.  

The Biodiversity Consultancy was engaged to support the preparation of a guidance document - Integrated Environmental & Social Sensitivity Mapping: Guidance for Early Offshore Wind Spatial Planning, or ‘SenMap’ - to help identify and map biodiversity and social sensitivities, and therefore help planners identify the best locations for offshore wind development. 

 

The challenge

Coordinated spatial planning at a scale appropriate for sector development and for understanding potential biodiversity and social risks can be resource intensive, multi-year, and costly endeavours. Full scale approaches like Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) and Strategic Environmental and Social Assessment (SESA) may not be readily accessible in emerging markets, especially when the timeframe for offshore wind development to meet climate targets is speeding up. Hence, there is a need for a pragmatic and less resource-intensive entry into early spatial planning in the sector. 

 

Our approach

The SenMap guidance outlines a flexible and iterative four-step approach to preparing sensitivity maps for both biodiversity and social attributes.  The approach is based on the key principles of the mitigation hierarchy, the precautionary principle, knowledge co-generation, and a gender-based and participatory approach.  

Desk-based review: Step 1 is a desk-based data collation and screening exercise intended to identify the most important attributes that could potentially be sensitive to offshore wind development and allocate preliminary sensitivity scores to them. 

Stakeholder engagement: Step 2 is designed to initiate early and open dialogue with biodiversity and social stakeholders, and to develop a landscape or seascape level understanding of the biodiversity and social context for offshore wind development. This includes a stakeholder mapping exercise to identify key stakeholders including government agencies, non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, academics and other individual specialists, Indigenous Peoples and traditional land managers, and coastal community representatives. In Step 2, these stakeholders review and validate the information collated in Step 1, and support planning for Step 3. 

Filling in the gaps with field work and knowledge co-generation: Step 3 is designed to address the high-level priority biodiversity and social information gaps identified in Step 2. The objective is to add to the available spatial data, which will in turn inform the review and validation of the biodiversity and social attributes included in the sensitivity maps. This is done through primary data collection and on-the-ground engagement with stakeholders.  

Sensitivity mapping: In Step 4, all the previous information is pulled together to develop consolidated spatial grid-based sensitivity maps – one for biodiversity and one for social attributes. The maps are colour-coded based on the sensitivity scores allocated to each attribute, so that they indicate areas of relatively higher versus lower sensitivity.  

 

Outcome

The outcome of the SenMap approach is biodiversity and social sensitivity maps intended to be viewed and analysed in parallel. Their key use is in the earliest stages of government-led spatial planning, to plan for avoiding areas of the highest biodiversity and social risk, and to support the identification of potential development areas where impacts are likely to be low. 

The maps offer insight into the potential challenges of managing biodiversity and social risks in the planning area in accordance with Good International Industry Practice and the environmental and social standards of international financial institutions and development banks, particularly where MSP or SESA has not yet been carried out. 

Sensitivity maps can be used alongside information on other technical parameters (like wind speed, water depth and seabed conditions) to further refine the identification of potentially suitable areas for development. SenMap advocates data sharing to support a more transparent and inclusive planning process. 

 

Report is available to read here.