The JustWind4All Project Sets Sail: Advancing Just and Effective Wind Governance in Europe
We are delighted to share with you the exciting developments of our Horizon Europe project, JustWind4All, which kicked off last January (2023). This pioneering initiative aims to accelerate a just and sustainable development of on- and offshore wind energy including emerging technologies like airborne and floating systems. The project addresses four key challenges related to effective and just governance: knowledge gaps, justice deficits, unsuitable policy frameworks, and unlocking novel resources.
The primary objective of JustWind4All is to foster the development of knowledge, practical guidelines, instruments, strategies, and training that facilitate equitable and efficient decision-making in onshore and offshore wind energy governance. One of the key activities of the JustWind4All project is engaging with local, regional, national, and EU wind energy governance actors across policy, community, and industry through its Wind Forum – a platform designed to meet, network, discuss and become agents of action.
JustWind4All involves twelve research partners across Europe, including the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Over three years, the UAB team, led by Cristina Madrid López, will create a state-of-the-art modelling framework for holistic assessment of wind energy impacts. For this endeavor, we will update our open-access ENBIOS tool, which integrates life cycle assessment (LCA) and multi-scale assessment of socio-ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM).
Catalonia is one of the main case studies in JustWind4All, with a key objective of adapting the ENBIOs tool to regional on- and offshore wind energy realities. For this reason, our first activity was a co-development workshop, held on March 29th 2023 at ICTA-UAB. In this workshop, we identified the parameters that will be included in the ENBIOS tool in order to make its results useful to overcome current barriers to wind energy deployment. The attendees of the workshop were regional policymakers, energy agencies, industry representatives, NGOs, and civil society operating in Catalonia. We identified barriers to both onshore and offshore wind energy and found their drivers and related ENBIOS potential updates.
With the results of the workshop, we identified potential action points for the development of ENBIOS, which include the regionalization of results, the inclusion of the local socio-ecological relations, the addition of metrics for impacts on marine dynamics and biodiversity, the development of metrics for trade-offs and the improvement of information transfer.
For more information visit our website and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn or contact Sostenipra’s principal investigator, Cristina Madrid López.
