Wind Power Development and Landscape (1 PDH)

Landscape has progressively been endowed with a new meaning in the assessment of renewable energy projects. This important shift is moving away from an expert paradigm focusing impact at a great distance for the local living context, to more participative and deliberative planning processes. This important progress is aided by landscape assessment methods that offer new opportunities to take people’s perceptions and bring the landscape into consideration. Landscape Character Assessment and Historical Landscape Characterization are methods for landscape analysis that preferably include dialogue in accordance with the European Landscape Convention (ELC) to account for new dimensions of landscapes, counteracting the attempts to objectivize social dimensions through classification and/or quantification. This article discusses the how wind power is influenced by different regional landscapes and policies.