While wind power is a low-carbon renewable energy technology with relatively little land footprint, the necessary infrastructure expansion still has land-related environmental impacts. Brazil has seen more than a ten-fold increase in wind power capacity in the last decade. However, little is known about these impacts of wind power generation in Brazil compared to other world regions, although Brazilian wind power infrastructure is concentrated in the least protected ecosystems that are prone to degradation, desertification and species extinction. This study focuses on land-use impacts of past wind power generation development in four Brazilian federal states, covering 80% of the country’s installed capacity. We assessed their spatial installation patterns, associated land-use and land cover change in the period before installation until 2018, and potential alternative installation locations, using a detailed wind turbine location database in combination with a high-resolution land-use and land cover map. In contrast to wind parks built in Europe, we found that 62% of the studied wind park area was covered by native vegetation and coastal sands. Overall, 3.2% of the total wind cluster area was converted from native vegetation to anthropogenic use. Wind parks installed mainly on native vegetation, on average, underwent higher land-use change compared to other wind parks. As Brazil intends to more than double its current wind power capacities by 2029, we explored possibilities to reduce environmental risks due to wind power expansion. We showed that this is feasible by integrating wind parks into human-altered areas, as sufficient wind resources there are available.

虽然风能是一种低碳可再生能源技术，占地面积相对较小，但必要的基础设施扩建仍会产生与土地相关的环境影响。在过去十年中，巴西的风电装机容量增长了十倍以上。然而，与世界其他地区相比，巴西对风力发电的这些影响知之甚少，尽管巴西的风力发电基础设施集中在易于退化、荒漠化和物种灭绝的受保护最少的生态系统中。本研究重点关注巴西四个联邦州过去风力发电开发对土地使用的影响，涵盖该国 80% 的装机容量。我们评估了它们在安装前至 2018 年的空间安装模式、相关的土地利用和土地覆盖变化，和潜在的替代安装位置，使用详细的风力涡轮机位置数据库以及高分辨率土地利用和土地覆盖图。与欧洲建造的风电场相比，我们发现所研究的风电场面积的 62% 被原生植被和海岸沙子覆盖。总体而言，3.2% 的风团总面积从原生植被转变为人为使用。与其他风电场相比，主要安装在原生植被上的风电场平均经历了更大的土地利用变化。由于巴西打算到 2029 年将其目前的风电装机容量增加一倍以上，我们探索了降低风电扩张带来的环境风险的可能性。我们表明，通过将风电场整合到人为改变的区域，这是可行的，因为那里有足够的风力资源。