This book provides timely, multidisciplinary cross-national comparison of the institutional and social processes through which renewable energy landscapes have emerged in Southern Europe. On the basis of case studies in these countries, it analyzes the way in which and the extent to which the development of renewable energies has affected landscape forms and whether or not it has contributed to a reformulation of landscape practices and values in these countries. Landscape is conceived broadly, as a material, social, political and historical process embedded into the local realm, going beyond aesthetic. The case studies analyze renewable energy landscapes in Southern Europe on different political and geographical scales and compare different types of renewable energy such as wind, hydro, solar and biomass power. The contributors are leading experts from Spain, France, Italy and Portugal. The book is intended for researchers, graduate students and professionals interested in geography, landscape and planning.

Winner of the 2017 EDRA Great Places Award (Research Category) Winner of the 2017 VT ASLA Chapter Award of Excellence (Communications Category) The Renewable Energy Landscape is a definitive guide to understanding, assessing, avoiding, and minimizing scenic impacts as we transition to a more renewable energy future. It focuses attention, for the first time, on the unique challenges solar, wind, and geothermal energy will create for landscape protection, planning, design, and management. Topics addressed include: Policies aimed at managing scenic impacts from renewable energy development and their social acceptance within North America, Europe and Australia Visual characteristics of energy facilities, including the design and planning techniques for avoiding or mitigating impacts or improving visual fit Methods of assessing visual impacts or energy projects and the best practices for creating and using visual simulations Policy recommendations for political and regulatory bodies. A comprehensive and practical book, The Renewable Energy Landscape is an essential resource for those engaged in planning, designing, or regulating the impacts of these new, critical energy sources, as well as a resource for communities that may be facing the prospect of development in their local landscape.

This book compiles guidelines for assessing the suitability and vulnerability of landscape for renewable energy projects and provides a multilingual glossary of terms for discussing landscape and renewable energy production, equipping the reader with tools and strategies for garnering public participation in urban planning.

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Landscape and Energy is a ground-breaking book about the effect of this transition on our environment. This book Landscape and Energy. Designing Transition is the first to visually compare the spatial footprints of all relevant energy sources; it explains the driving forces behind the exponential growth of our use of energy and sketches the breath-taking task that lies ahead for spatial designers, planners and politicians. 0The options and choices for an emerging 'post-fossil landscape' are elaborated in a wide variety of case study designs. After all, energy is relevant at every scale and all levels of abstraction, from global political strategies to the solar panel on the roof. The challenges receive due attention in a series of essays on the energy market, the role of politics, the psychology of transition, and technical developments and constraints. Ultimately, the transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy proves to be much more than a technical task for professionals. On closer consideration, the energy transition above all is a cultural task that affects everyone.

This cross-sectional, interdisciplinary study traces the “history of innovation” of renewable energies in Germany. It features five renewable energy sectors of electricity generation: biomass, photovoltaic, wind energy, geothermal energy and hydropower. The study tracks the development of the respective technologies as well as their contribution to electricity generation. It focuses on driving forces and constraints for renewable energies in the period between 1990 and today.

'Few people who think about the state of the world are content with the status quo. The increasingly complex mix of economic, social, environmental and political problems at all scales requires new ways of thinking. It also requires new ways of integrating mutually supportive ideas and approaches, which is what this useful new book offers around the theme of sustainable consumption. The editors and contributors offer a breadth and depth of research from three domains: the new economics, socio-technical transitions and social practice, with a focus on consumption that meets the needs of people within the limits of the biosphere.' – Peter A. Victor, York University, Canada 'In recent years much hard thinking has been devoted to exploring the transition to true sustainability and consumption's role in it. Innovations in Sustainable Consumption offers an impressive and enormously useful synthesis of this new work. Highly recommended.' – James Gustave Speth, Vermont University Law School, US and author of America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy 'This is a very timely and inspiring book. The editors have carefully compiled original contributions from leading researchers in sustainable consumption, reflecting the important work of the SCORAI network and beyond. This is a "must" read for those who want to know where research in sustainable consumption is really heading.' – Lucia A. Reisch, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark This timely volume recognizes that traditional policy approaches to reduce human impacts on the environment through technological change – for example, emphasizing resource efficiency and the development of renewable energy sources – are insufficient to meet the most pressing sustainability challenges of the twenty-first century. Instead, the editors and contributors argue that we must fundamentally reconfigure our lifestyles and social institutions if we are to make the transition toward a truly sustainable future. These expert contributions pinpoint specific areas in which innovation will be required. These include economic policies, socio-technical systems of production and consumption, and dominant social practices. Drawing on these and other diverse areas of scholarship, this fascinating book highlights new conceptual frameworks for achieving the twin sustainability goals of decreased resource use and enhanced individual and societal well-being. Students, professors and policymakers in ecological economics, innovation studies, environmental policy and many other related fields will find much of interest in this pathbreaking volume.

Human well-being depends in many ways on maintaining the stock of natural resources which deliver the services from which human’s benefit. However, these resources and flows of services are increasingly threatened by unsustainable and competing land uses. Particular threats exist to those public goods whose values are not well-represented in markets or whose deterioration will only affect future generations. As market forces alone are not sufficient, effective means for local and regional planning are needed in order to safeguard scarce natural resources, coordinate land uses and create sustainable landscape structures. This book argues that a solution to such challenges in Europe can be found by merging the landscape planning tradition with ecosystem services concepts. Landscape planning has strengths in recognition of public benefits and implementation mechanisms, while the ecosystem services approach makes the connection between the status of natural assets and human well-being more explicit. It can also provide an economic perspective, focused on individual preferences and benefits, which helps validate the acceptability of environmental planning goals. Thus linking landscape planning and ecosystem services provides a two-way benefit, creating a usable science to meet the needs of local and regional decision making. The book is structured around the Driving forces-Pressures-States-Impacts-Responses framework, providing an introduction to relevant concepts, methodologies and techniques. It presents a new, ecosystem services-informed, approach to landscape planning that constitutes both a framework and toolbox for students and practitioners to address the environmental and landscape challenges of 21st century Europe.