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Renewable energy targets may undermine their sustainability

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 974–976 (2020)Cite this article

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As the world’s economies seek to use new renewable energy developments to address climate change and reinvigorate economies post-COVID-19, avoiding a fixation on targets in decision-making will ensure positive social and environmental outcomes.

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Fig. 1: The potential positive and negative outcomes of renewable energy development.

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Acknowledgements

We thank W. Turner, J. Powell and J. Calvert for their comments on early versions of this manuscript and S. Houghton for producing the figure. S.S. was funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. E.M.M. was supported by an ARC Future Fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Scott Spillias & Eve McDonald-Madden

  2. Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

    Scott Spillias & Eve McDonald-Madden

  3. Aquarium of the Pacific, Long Beach, CA, USA

    Peter Kareiva

  4. Natural Capital Project, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Mary Ruckelshaus

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  1. Scott Spillias
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  2. Peter Kareiva
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  4. Eve McDonald-Madden
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Contributions

E.M.M. and P.K. conceived the initial idea for the manuscript, and S.S. and E.M.M. developed the concepts and structure of the Comment. S.S. wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed equally to content development and revisions of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Scott Spillias.

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Spillias, S., Kareiva, P., Ruckelshaus, M. et al. Renewable energy targets may undermine their sustainability. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 974–976 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-00939-x

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