This week we experienced the longest day of the year. As the sun reached its farthest point on the horizon, it showered half of the world in the year’s fullest light. This week also marks Pollinator Week, an annual celebration of bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and the other amazing and important pollinators that fertilize plants, provide healthy food for us and enhance habitats for wild animals.
With our climate warming rapidly and pollinator populations in steep decline, we need to embrace solutions. Rapidly scaling up pollinator friendly solar farms is one of those solutions.
Global warming is perhaps the most dire of a series of interlocking ecological crises that have emerged from our dependence on fossil fuels, our society’s fixation on maximizing economic growth, and a “throw-away” economy built around the extraction of resources from nature and their conversion into disposable — even single-use — products that create pollution and waste.
Human activities have caused approximately 1.0° C of warming above pre-industrial levels already. At its current pace, global warming caused by human activity is increasing at 0.2°C per decade. If the planet continues to warm at its current rate, the rise in average global temperature is highly likely to reach 1.5°C — the aspirational target adopted by the nations of the world in the Paris climate agreement — between 2030 and 2052. Warming at this intensity and speed threatens the future stability of our climate.
To avert the worst impacts of global warming, America and the rest of the world must rapidly reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. Not only is the amount of emission reductions important, but so is the speed. Because carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants build up in the atmosphere, achieving large reductions in the near term reduces the size of the reductions we need to make later on.
We need to set our sights on a future powered by 100% renewable energy and do everything we can to reach that vision as quickly as possible.
While our planet warms, other related crises scream for our attention. For example, the disturbing decline of pollinator populations. The number of butterflies, bumblebees, bats, bird species and other pollinators is shrinking across the world. Scientists attribute the collapse of pollinator populations to several factors, including climate change, habitat fragmentation, pesticide use and more.
To restore pollinator health, we need to take action on a number of fronts:
■ reduce the pollution that’s warming our planet
■curtail the use of pesticides that harm pollinators
■aggressively expand habitats so these remarkable animals have flowers to forage on and places to live.
One solution to climate change and pollinator declines is planting native pollinator habitats under and around the panels of solar farms.
This spring, the United States had 121 gigawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity, producing enough energy to power more than 23 million homes. And the costs of solar have come down. Between 2010 and 2018, the cost of utility-scale solar systems fell by 80%-82%.
Since climate change is one of the biggest drivers of pollinator decline, the growth in solar energy is welcome news for addressing both of these concurrent crises. We need to continue to welcome solar in our communities, while also finding win-win opportunities like colocating solutions.
Some local farmers, such as Jesse Robertson-Dubois, already speak to the benefits of colocating solar panels and pollinator habitats on their farms.
My hometown of Amherst, just started a working group to determine solar bylaws. One of the things they will be looking at is whether to require solar developers to plant native pollinator habitats under solar farms located in town.
Meanwhile, in state houses across the country, lawmakers are considering ways to expand pollinator habitats while growing clean energy. For example, 12 states have published pollinator-friendly scorecards (eight of those states require them by law), which lay out a set of criteria for what is “beneficial to pollinators” within the managed landscape of a photovoltaic solar facility.
To solve the convergent crises of global warming and pollinator collapse requires society to repower with clean renewable energy, while transcending our fixation on maximizing economic growth, and our “throw-away” economy.
Colocating solar panels and pollinator habitats won’t solve all our crises, but it is one small solution finding broad support. As we celebrate the summer solstice and Pollinator Awareness Week, let’s lean into this solution.
Johanna Neumann, of Amherst, has spent the past two decades working to protect our air, water and open spaces, defend consumers in the marketplace and advance a more sustainable economy and democratic society. She can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.