Policies promoting solar power construction projects in China have contributed to a decline in bird diversity across the country.
Those findings, from a study published Thursday in the journal Science, highlight the environmental impacts of large-scale solar developments and suggest ways that policies supporting photovoltaics could be improved in China, which has installed nearly as many solar panels as the rest of the world combined.
The researchers assessed policies promoting solar power while also measuring bird diversity, an indicator of ecosystem health, across 2,344 counties in China monthly from 2014 to 2023.
“The average effect is modest, but it is meaningful when it occurs systematically across many counties,” lead author Zhang Huiming, a researcher at the Institute of Climate Economy and Low-carbon Industry at Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, said in a written statement he wrote with his co-authors.
In their multi-step assessment, the researchers first collected official solar-related directives from provincial, city and county government websites to create a “policy stringency index,” which scored the documents based on their binding force and originating agency.
