Everyone working in conservation knows how difficult it is to have honest conversations with politicians or the public. While news about wars, floods or celebrities seem to grab the headlines easily, it seems no one wants to hear about the incredibly slow car crash known as nature depletion. Conservation press releases instead generally focus on flashes of good news – which, of course, get engagement but mask the stark background.
Until quite recently, no one seemed to want to hear scientists warning about climate change, either. Climate change was seen as a depressing, remote and unstoppable disaster-in-waiting, which was made all the worse because no one could realistically do anything about it.
Unchecked renewable rollout threatens Welsh nature
Then, something changed. Renewable power technology reached a turning point so that it became possible to talk not only about forbidding problems, but also about achievable solutions. A story of this kind is an irresistible boon. In just a few short years, both the public and political class have thrown their weight behind shifting the power industry towards building renewables. After so long without a plan, it seems there is only one way to slow climate change: build as much, as large, and as fast, as possible.
As with any seismic social shift, this change will create winners but also losers. It is apparent from the January 2026 report by the Independent Advisory Group on Future Electricity Grid for Wales that, the transformation is currently being carried out without any detailed strategy and or any attempt to understand the effects. Politicians duck responsibility for the haphazard industrialisation of Wales’s landscapes, pretending that planning decisions even on Developments of National Significance are merely an administrative matter for Planning and Environment Decisions Wales (PEDW), while simultaneously relentlessly promoting the overriding importance of Planning Policy 17 on Renewable and Low Carbon Energy and Associated Infrastructure. As a result, PEDW’s decisions subordinate planning principles purporting to conserve soils, habitats and species – even where development is proposed within sites of special scientific interest – to that sole political objective.
If this is allowed to continue, Wales’s natural environment and future generations will, unfortunately, be major losers.
Fragmentation weakens nature’s resilience The Lawton Review in England established the core principles – equally applicable in Wales – which must be implemented to enable nature to respond resiliently to climate change: we need more natural habitats which are bigger, in better condition and – crucially joined up. Isolated nature reserves are not enough. In a landscape fragmented by human activity like urban or industrial development and intensive agriculture, and subject to rapid change, such as climate change, species are unable to move or adapt quickly enough.
Action is needed across whole landscapes to reverse the effects of fragmentation and environmental degradation. The Lawton Review cites the importance of ecological networks, suites of high-quality wildlife sites containing biological diversity, with connections between them enabling species, or their genes, to move. A coherent and resilient ecological network helps wildlife cope with change, and also improves the ability of the natural environment to provide for us.
A landscape where habitats remain connected
At present, much of Mid-Wales, and the Cambrian Mountains in particular, are in such a condition that they can provide just such a connection between habitats. It is not necessary to claim that Mid-Wales remains a pristine environment. Clearly, like the rest of the British Isles, it has been inhabited and the land used for human purposes for millennia. However, it has been subject to far less widespread modern development. There have been no new towns since Newtown was expanded in the 1960s, no motorways or major railway lines, and precious few ‘A’ roads. There have also been no coal mines, steel mills, power stations or pylon chains and only a few, small industrial parks.
All of this can be seen as a problem for economic growth. However, it can also be seen as a triumph for Welsh nature. Relative stability is very important for biodiversity, as the long-term persistence or extirpation of a species is often associated with the individual or additive effects of changes in both climate and land use.
There are still undrained bogs, extensive heaths and patches of natural scrubby woodland. Agriculture, apart from the infamous intensive poultry units which have wreaked havoc with the River Gŵy/Wye, has changed relatively little compared to the industrialisation of farms in more productive regions. As a result, habitats dependent on farmland or livestock grazing have persisted longer and over greater areas than elsewhere. While commercial conifer plantations have fragmented habitats and exacerbated acidification of streams, few other sources of human pollution of waterways are physically present in the region meaning that atmospheric pollution and heating are the principal culprits in damaging waterways.
Large scale development of renewable power stations and their access roads, construction compounds, logistics parks and pylon chains will represent a step change in industrialisation and fragmentation from this baseline.
Ecosystems threatened by renewable expansion
Conservationists’ opposition to wind turbines often focuses on aerial species – birds, bats and insects – which may be killed by collision with the rotating blades. Native mammals such as otter, water vole and dormouse are also cited. With the catastrophic decline of all of these in recent decades, this effect is of course extremely important. But the subtler and longer term effects – the kind humans have always so successfully ignored – can be as significant in determining the real degree and impact of habitat fragmentation and degradation. These effects are mostly independent of the form of the development: the same issues would arise if Wales were building a sequence of world-class hospitals, universities, manufacturing centres or a spaceport instead.
However, loss of habitat area to the actual structures, their foundations and access roads is only the tip of the iceberg. The remaining disconnected smaller patches of habitat are intrinsically less resilient. Saturation from flooding, or desiccation from wildfires or extended drought periods are more likely to affect an entire population if its territory is smaller – and no amount of turbine building in Wales will affect either the temperature or rainfall vicissitudes of ongoing climate change. Pollution from vehicles along the tracks built to enable access to or around these remote sites will contaminate soil and air, to the detriment of plants and invertebrates up to 100m either side.
Wind turbines modify ambient environmental conditions through their effect on air flows, creating a microclimate of reduced wind speed but greater turbulence which, in turn, affects temperature distribution and plant transpiration over a significant area. The much larger turbines now being brought onshore for the first time will have a proportionately greater impact in this way, too. Local soils, invertebrates and flora are affected, not only by being physically removed (and possibly replaced) during the construction but also by several other serious effects. Long-term compaction, habitat fragmentation and edge effects changing the species best able to adapt to the site, drainage changes affecting groundwater distribution and levels as well as runoff and soil erosion will all change the distribution of soil flora and fauna and, therefore, the food web of higher up species which depend upon them.
Reptile, amphibian and other species which use sound or vibration to communicate are affected by both audible and infrasound produced by wind farms. This can affect behaviours from mating to hunting to hibernation.
Invasive species and irreversible change
The introduction of species not previously present, whether ‘native’ or alien, is also a factor obstructing any possibility of a return to the pre-development state. The cleared areas and disturbed soils of major construction sites, with pedestrian and vehicle traffic carrying soils and seeds from elsewhere, can favour rapid establishment of colonies of species which then expand into surrounding, undisturbed areas. Together with the changes in temperature and moisture at or near the ground surface caused by wind farm operation, these influences can shift the established plant communities over a broad area.
Construction of culverts and bridges can act as barriers to movement of local aquatic species (whether migratory or not) – and in this age of highly variable rainfall, past calculations as to the appropriate size of these structures can no longer be taken as a reliable guide to what will work in the future. Changes in runoff will also affect silt levels in streams and rivers connected to the site, even at a considerable difference downstream, with major impacts on a range of aquatic species.
Where multiple renewable projects are built in close proximity (as is proposed in the Cambrian Mountains east of Lampeter) their cumulative effects may be greater than the sum of their parts as the ability of a displaced species to resettle or colonise nearby areas with similar conditions is removed.
A remote landscape no more
Finally, this Land that Time Forgot has also been overlooked, so far, by mass tourism, which focuses instead on Wales’s glamorous National Parks and iconic coastline. Human activities inevitably disrupt natural systems, and although building density and other forms of development represent long-term and spatially constant sources of disturbance, avoided by sensitive wildlife species, human presence even in a transient, recreational mode still affects wildlife habitat use and behaviour. Building roads and tracks for construction of renewable energy infrastructure will obviously disrupt wildlife while it is going on, but more importantly increase access for other human activities over a very wide area long term.
Globally, it is known that increasing human presence drives wildlife away both spatially and temporally, increasing nocturnal activity among species that would otherwise be present during daylight. This can also be expected to follow from the incursion of accessible roads and tracks into wide areas of Wales which were previously only reachable by individuals on foot, mountain bike or horseback.
Changing the climate conversation
Opposing specific renewable energy developments is a tough communication challenge. Almost any audience wants the comforting glow arising from the twin messages of “we have a solution” and “someone else is taking care of it,” collectively permitting the audience to go back to what they were already doing: looking after their own business. But as with any engineering problem, there is more than one way, or place, to go about it, and different solutions have different potential costs and benefits. The public discussion needs to move on from “climate change bad; turbines good” to consider all the potential ways of bringing more renewable energy into the mix, and the upsides and downsides for each of them.
Meanwhile, of course, the financiers and construction companies who stand to profit from all of this carry on with their business: promoting onshore wind power as a solution which, by slowing the effects of climate change, can actually reduce the overall decline of nature. The trouble is, if through the construction itself, we weaken the biodiversity Wales has left, Nature may not have enough resilience left to restore the healthy ecological networks we’ll need for the future, once we’re finished.
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