How can sustainable hydropower help the environment?

The overall situation is bleak. You don’t have to look far to observe how biodiversity is disappearing around us. How long has it been since you last heard a thrush sing? The 2020 Living Planet Report by the World Wide Fund for Nature summarizes it nicely: “Biodiversity is being lost at a rate never seen before in history.” Forests are being felled, oceans are being polluted, and wetlands are being destroyed.The main source of this devastation is human growth. With new cities springing up all over the place, the impact on biodiversity will only grow. Over the next few decades, energy consumption is predicted to rise dramatically, with much of the extra capacity coming from renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydropower (fingers crossed). Increasing clean energy sources is critical to lowering greenhouse gas emissions and reaching the Paris Agreement’s goals. What, though, is the impact of the renewable energy push on biodiversity?

The mitigation hierarchy is the most frequent technique to controlling biodiversity impacts from hydropower. The mitigation hierarchy consists of four steps: prevent, minimize, mitigate, and compensate. To begin, a project should constantly strive to minimize or eliminate unwanted or bad effects. This can include adjustments in site selection or project design in the case of hydropower to avoid flooding of sensitive biodiversity regions. When avoiding negative consequences isn’t possible, projects should try to minimize them..

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