Integrating RENewable energy and Ecosystem Services in environmental and energy policies

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Creating win-win solutions from trade-offs? The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), and recently the EU 2020 Biodiversity Strategy emphasizes that human well-being is tightly linked to environmental conditions through the delivery of Ecosystem Services (ES), and therefore good territorial environmental management could, in principle, also deliver better outcomes for people and environment, resulting in win-win solutions. Low-carbon policies and Renewable Energy Sources (RES) development are challenged by the complexity of linkages between ecological, physical, social, and economic factors in relation to trade-offs and synergies between RES exploitation and the delivery of multiple ES. Generalizations and knowledge shortage lead to missing the acknowledgment of potential synergies between RES and ES within the governance and policy frameworks at territorial level. The IRENES project will put in place interregional knowledge and experience exchange process to identify gaps and barriers within current ERDF and energy policy instruments in relation to the RES and ES co-relation, including environmental, social, economic, and governance concerns. The active commitment of Structural Funds Managing Authorities, and governing bodies of other policy instruments addressed in the project, is of paramount importance to integrate the potential RES development trade-offs and co-benefits with ES into the territorial development policies. Therefore, IRENES consortium priority is to communicate and dialogue WITH policy makers and not to policy makers in order to trigger the knowledge transfer and to inform, with scientific evidences on RES and Ecosystem Services, the decision makers about the potential of a win–win outcome that can be incorporated into the regional and national ERDF Operational programmes, energy and climate strategies and laws. Let’s the IRENES stakeholders be the winners of the low-carbon policies challenges!

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