News

3 April 2019

WinWind discusses social acceptance issues at University Alliance for Sustainability Conference

Within the conference of the University Alliance for Sustainability, the coordinator of the WinWind project Rosaria Di Nucci from the Environmental Policy Research Centre of the Freie Universität Berlin, participated in theworkshop “Transition to low carbon economy in comparison perspective”.

 

The workshop looked at policies and practices in different countries, regions and cities that address national policies and projects on
sustainable transitions and specific commitments made at the Paris conference in 2015. The workshop focused on new policy proposals and provided room for addressing critical social aspects of transition policies and programmes. The participants were informed about the diversity of strategies and challenges in different countries aiming at accelerating emissions reduction and promoting the transition to low‐carbon economies.

 

Di Nucci discussed the framework conditions to promote the socially inclusive and environmentally sound uptake of renewable energy with a special focus on Germany and on the policy framework of the European Union. Her presentation described the legal and regulatory framework, analysed the reasons for diminishing acceptance, and introduced promising approaches that drive social and local acceptance and enhance the uptake of wind energy projects. The discussion highlighted the role of financial
participation and of compensation and how shareholding of citizens/local communities and high levels of procedural participation in the decision-making process can help minimising conflicts. In the event that aimed at bridging insights and theoretical concepts from different disciplines, involving academics and practitioners participated researchers of the universities in the University Alliance for Sustainability network (Hebrew University Jerusalem, University of British Columbia (Canada), Peking University and St. Petersburg State University) as well as a number of European and German scholars and practitioners.