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Large-scale green grabbing for wind and solar photovoltaic development in Brazil

Nature Sustainability (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Large-scale wind and solar photovoltaic infrastructures are rapidly expanding in Brazil. These low-carbon technologies can exacerbate land struggles rooted in historical inequities in landownership, lack of regulation and weak governance. Here we trace how green grabbing—that is, the large-scale appropriation and control of (undesignated) public lands, both formally legal and illicit, for the development of wind and solar photovoltaic power—has developed in Brazil from 2000 to 2021. We find that global investors and owners, mainly from Europe, are involved in 78% of wind and 96% of solar photovoltaic parks, occupying 2,148 km2 and 102 km2 of land, respectively. We also show that land privatization is the prevalent land tenure regime for securing land, indicating substantial transformations of prior (undesignated) public and common lands. We conclude that green grabbing is a persistent, critical phenomenon in Brazil, requiring transparency and vigilant monitoring of land claims and tenure modifications.

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Fig. 1: Ownership of and investment in wind power assets.
Fig. 2: Ownership of and investment in solar PV assets.
Fig. 3: Green grabbing in the context of a wind power park.
Fig. 4: Land area by type of land tenure regime.
Fig. 5: Cumulative land privatizations for wind and solar PV parks.

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Data availability

The ownership and finance data that support the findings of this study are available from BNEF, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under licence for the current study and so are not publicly available. All other datasets are publicly available from government institutions, but under non-sharing licences. We therefore cannot provide a repository with the original data; however, we have uploaded the processed data to Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.10360706 (ref. 71). In addition, we provide the download sources in Supplementary Table 1.

Code availability

The R code used to analyse the data can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.10360706.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. G. D. Huber, F. Wiesenhofer and C. Mikovits for support in data preparation. We particularly thank the entire consortium (AATR, CPT, IRPAA, 10envolvimento and GeografAR from the Federal University of Bahia) for collaboration and knowledge sharing in the initiative ‘Energias Renováveis na Bahia: Caminhos e Descaminhos’ (https://www.dossienergiasrenovaveis.com.br/index.html) between April 2021 and July 2022. J.S. and M.K. acknowledge support from the European Research Council (grant ‘reFUEL’ ERC-2017-STG 758149). N.A. acknowledges support from the European Research Council (grant ‘LINKS’ ERC-2019-STG 802891). The findings do not represent the views of the funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Sustainable Economic Development, BOKU University, Vienna, Austria

    Michael Klingler & Johannes Schmidt

  2. Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London, London, UK

    Nadia Ameli & Jamie Rickman

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M.K. and J.S. designed the empirical analysis, performed the data analysis and wrote the paper. N.A. provided the data and discussed and revised the paper. J.R. contributed with data analysis rules and revised the paper.

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Correspondence to Michael Klingler.

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Supplementary Tables 1–5, Figs. 1–9 and Sections 2.1 and 2.2.

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Klingler, M., Ameli, N., Rickman, J. et al. Large-scale green grabbing for wind and solar photovoltaic development in Brazil. Nat Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01346-2

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