Publicações

Climate change and biodiversity loss are two of the most pressing environmental challenges confronting humanity in the 21st century. Strategies for mitigating climate change are often assumed to provide co-benefits towards biodiversity conservation, but can also incur strong biodiversity costs. Hydropower is increasingly drawn upon to reduce the carbon intensity of energy systems, but dams also affect biodiversity by fragmenting aquatic habitats, disrupting fish movement, and changing river habitats. Balancing climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation as countries seek to decarbonize their energy systems is critical, especially in emerging economies with large and hyperdiverse river systems such as Colombias Magdalena River, the countrys largest river wholly contained within its borders. Here we use multi-objective optimization to identify whether dam portfolios that contribute to Colombias commitments to carbon neutrality by 2050 are synergistic or antagonistic to those that prioritize biodiversity conservation. We find that Pareto-optimal solutions for minimizing the impacts on freshwater fish diversity of hydropower are largely non-overlapping with those that minimize greenhouse gas emissions. Optimizing for biodiversity, carbon and energy simultaneously identifies the lowest tradeoff solutions but also provides many more alternative options, posing a challenge for policy making. Ultimately, as a less carbon-intensive source of energy, hydropower results in unavoidable biodiversity impacts, but strategic planning reduces potential tradeoffs between climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation goals.