Conference Agenda

In light of the growing expansion of renewable energy capacity towards Net Zero goals, there is a necessity to quantify the societal and ecological trade-offs resulting from the construction and operation of new offshore wind farms. In this study, we use the UK case study and conduct a discrete choice experiment to elicit societal preferences regarding trade-offs between different potential effects on the delivery of ecosystem services resulting from offshore wind development. We operationalise the concept of ecosystem services by combining ecological and socio-economic modelling for three marine functions and services that can potentially be affected by offshore wind development: fish stock health, which determines fishing opportunities; seabed integrity, which relates to carbon and nutrient regulation; habitat and species maintenance, which describes biodiversity levels in terms of species abundance. Our results reveal that respondents have a propensity to choose the offshore wind development alternatives over business-as-usual. Respondents value habitat and species maintenance most of all, followed by seabed integrity and then fishing opportunities. The size of the wind farm developments does not, on average, have a substantial impact on respondent preferences. In contrast to the number of households supplied with clean offshore wind energy is positively associated with higher levels of respondents' favour. We find that, as the level of ecosystem service attributes increases (from low to moderate to good to excellent), the variability between respondent preferences increases as well. This suggests that, although the majority of respondents have some baseline appreciation for ecosystem services and offshore wind, there are significant differences in the degree to which different demographic segments value the natural environment and the renewable energy expansion offshore.