What Happens When Climate Solutions Cause Problems?

In the small beachside settlement of Praia do Xavier, along Brazil’s northeastern coast, villagers have long practiced traditional raft fishing, farmed the dunes, or harvested shellfish as a way of life. They did so for generations without any infrastructure to speak of—no roads, schools, electricity, or running water—on what was common land, freely accessible to the public.

That is, until the Brazilian government allowed much of that land to be privatized so a European company could install a 50-turbine wind farm along the shoreline to capture the coastal breezes. The construction of the 2,570-acre wind farm in the state of Ceará added up to 104 megawatts of clean energy to Brazil’s electric grid when it opened in 2009, but it also drained the lagoons that villagers relied upon for winter fishing and impeded their access to other traditional fishing grounds.

Ramping up renewable energy production is a crucial climate goal, and one that Brazil has excelled at to date. But the rush to produce more solar and wind power has also led to new forms of land speculation and “green grabbing.” A study by University College London researchers found that over a third of wind parks installed in Brazil from 2000 to 2021 were built on legally dubious grounds, either on common lands or without legal titles, and most are owned by international investors.

A pair of researchers in Brazil is now studying how such land use decisions are being made, with a particular focus on the state of Ceará, and how to ensure renewable energy expansion doesn’t result in further climate injustices. Their project is one of seven finalists selected for support through a request for proposals issued by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in March.

“Society can’t afford to delay the energy transition or the work needed to adapt to our changing climate,” says Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute. “But we need to do so in a way that avoids undermining people’s ability to provide for themselves and their families at a time when that ability is already challenged by climate change itself.” It’s a tension unfolding around the world, as governments, utilities, and nonprofits try to achieve a quick but just transition to clean energy, balancing the critical need for rapid renewable energy development with other demands on the land.

“With this suite of research, we hope to help accelerate climate action that anticipates and avoids or offsets any negative consequences,” Cotter says.

Through case studies and interviews, Flavia Collaço, visiting professor at Universidade Federal do Ceará, and Joachim Stassart, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, will analyze the expert and government knowledge, technological tools, and underlying politics that inform how land is allocated for renewable energy projects, why that process often ignores traditional and communal land uses, and how it could be improved to reduce land dispossession and climate injustices as more wind and solar projects go forward.

The first stage of Brazil’s wind projects was almost all installed along the coast, Collaço says. “So it’s mainly affected small artisanal fishermen, and Indigenous people and traditional communities that live in this coastal region,” she says. “But the second stage of wind projects is coming to the countryside, and that means new challenges and new types of communities and ecosystems that are going to be impacted.”

“Brazil is a country with a lot of land conflicts and a lot of speculation related to land, but it’s usually and historically been related to agriculture,” Stassart notes. “With this renewable energy boom, there’s this new form of speculation, and it’s in areas that weren’t the target of land conflict in the past.”

Parts of rural Ceará have yet to go through a formal land regularization process, which creates potential for land conflict and speculation as renewable projects move inland. “In Brazil, it’s very common, especially in the most remote areas, that there are a lot of overlapping land claims and a lot of informality in the land sector,” Stassart says. “So people can be using the land for generations without holding a title to it . . . there are still a lot of Indigenous and local communities who don’t have access to a formal land title that recognizes their rights.”

Less than a fifth of Ceará has yet to be regularized, but much of that land is in areas now targeted for new wind and solar installations, which has set the formalization process in motion, Collaço says. “So our research is going to capture precisely the beginning of this process.”

The Lincoln Institute selected six other projects to support through this RFP, many of which focus on curtailing “green grabbing” practices:

• Researchers from the SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies in Ghana will perform a literature analysis and empirical case study on the rise and fall of land-based biofuel investments in Sub-Saharan Africa, to understand why most of these projects have failed, collapsed, or been abandoned.
• National strategies for reducing biodiversity loss and land-based emissions are often isolated as separate policy goals, despite their obvious connections. A team from the University of British Columbia, University of Melbourne, and the Land Gap research collective will examine the feasibility of including national strategies as part of a just transition, identifying both the role and the limitations of domestic policy in addressing the drivers of deforestation.
• An international and interdisciplinary team led by the German Institute for Global and Area Studies will assess the impacts of land-intensive carbon-offset projects on the livelihoods of local communities in Madagascar and Indonesia, and the effectiveness of sustainability standards in addressing these impacts.
• An environmental consultant affiliated with the University of Lausanne in Switzerland will look at how the establishment of protected areas for conservation purposes over the past century has often led to conflict or even outright tragedy for Indigenous peoples and local communities, with the goal of drawing lessons for how large-scale ecosystem and forest restoration projects can avoid having the same negative impacts.
• In Central Appalachia, corporate landowners have long extracted resources and value while leaving locals impoverished. As the region’s forests draw interest for their carbon sequestration potential, a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs researcher will use power mapping, interviews, and data analysis to evaluate the initial outcomes of the Family Forest Carbon Program. The new endeavor, by the American Forest Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, aims to enroll small landowners in Kentucky and West Virginia as beneficiaries of the expanding carbon market.
• A team from the University of Technology Sydney will look at emerging community partnership models in Australian cities that have allowed community-driven conservation efforts to reach scale and expand their impact by overcoming common barriers to such initiatives, including a lack of secure land and stringent land use planning standards.

To learn more about all Lincoln Institute RFPs, fellowships, and research opportunities, visit the research and fellowship opportunities section of our website.

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Wind turbines at Canoa Quebrada Beach in Ceara, Brazil. Credit: Cristian Lourenço via iStock/Getty Images Plus.