Wind, forests and peatlands - Transformation through land use to C neutral society

The aim of the project is to develop a decision-making scheme as a collaboration of researchers, land use planners and decision-makers to help the energy and land use sectors in achieving carbon neutrality. The scheme will also take into account biodiversity, ecosystem services and public acceptability. A uniform method for assessing the net carbon benefits of wind power, management of forests and peatland use will be developed. The impact of decreasing the visibility of wind farms and drafting policies supporting carbon sinks will be assessed in the context of public acceptability, and models suited to these three forms of land use will be created. Optimisation is used to find combinations of different forms of land use that could be used to efficiently deliver climate benefits while taking into account ecosystem values, public acceptability and policies supporting carbon sinks. The decision-making scheme increases the acceptability and efficiency of land use planning and decision making and contributes to achieving a carbon neutral society. The process, methods and source codes of the decision-making scheme will be published for open access to ensure the scheme can be further developed and used in future software projects. The project is part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s climate measures in the land use sector, and it is coordinated by the Natural Resources Institute Finland.