Wind farms are not their friends.
We’ve known for decades that wind farm are deadly for birds, and their effects on jaguars and pumas has been in the news of late. This is from the Wall Street Journal (bypasses paywall)—
Jaguars and pumas are facing extinction in the Caatinga, Brazil’s northeastern shrublands, as Europe and China pour investment into wind farms, puncturing the land with vast turbines that are scaring the animals away from the region’s scant water sources.
Particularly sensitive to changes to their habitat, the jaguars and pumas abandon their lairs as soon as construction work on the wind farms begins, said Claudia Bueno de Campos, a biologist who helped found the group Friends of the Jaguars and has tracked the region’s vanishing feline population. They then roam vast distances across the dusty plains in search of new streams and rivers.
The wind power industry has doubled its capacity in Brazil since 2018, setting the country up to be the world’s fourth-biggest producer by 2027 behind China, the U.S. and Germany, according to the Brazilian Wind Power Association, an industry body.
But by helping to solve one problem—climate change—the wind industry risks creating others, warn conservationists.
. . .
While the big cats are still plentiful in the Amazon and Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, those in the Caatinga are unique, having adapted to cope with the intense heat. Jaguars have yellowish fur with black spots and are stockier than pumas, which feature a single brown to gray color. Jaguars are more sensitive to changes in their environment, biologists say.
The disappearance of the felines would throw the region’s ecosystem out of whack, leading to a proliferation of animals that serve as prey, such as wild boar, deer and armadillos, said Felipe Melo, a researcher at the Federal University of Pernambuco who has studied the impact of the wind power industry in the Caatinga.
Read the whole thing.