Helping communities visualise the social impact of renewable developments

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From the job scene, to water usage, to peak hour traffic, renewable projects can alter life in communities for better or for worse. But until recently, understanding their full impact has been a task for the imagination, with residents near prospective developments often unclear how their daily lives might be affected.

“Any given project will have a wide range of touchpoints with the community; and each of these touchpoints will be complex and interrelated,” said Dr Robert Hortle of the University of Tasmania (UTAS).

“This becomes even more challenging when there are multiple projects in a region – it can be really difficult to understand how their impacts might interact to affect communities.”

Robert says this presents an issue when communities are asked to embrace new developments in their area. While proponents may recognise the social and economic potential, quantifying and relaying the benefits and trade-offs associated with multiple projects to residents can be difficult. This complexity creates apprehension as states push towards net zero targets.

“Here in Tasmania, there is a lot of public support for the clean energy transition, but many in host communities are apprehensive, and some are actively hostile towards specific projects,” Robert said.

“I believe that comes from the lack of a shared vision for Tasmania’s zero-emissions future – without this, it’s very difficult for people to understand why we might need all these large projects and how they fit together.”

A better way

Robert and colleagues at UTAS’s ‘Tasmanian Policy Exchange’ and CSIRO’s ‘Towards Net Zero Mission’ are hoping to change this with a sophisticated modelling technique, known as participatory systems mapping.

The initiative is being piloted in the Tamar Valley, in Tasmania’s north.

“We’ve been working with local government, regional authorities and business stakeholders to build up a qualitative systems map, which is this amazing, complicated looking diagram with all these causal loops and arrows showing how different things in a region impact each other,” Robert explained.

The model aims to capture how introducing new renewable projects to a region might affect the interactions between everything from industrial water usage, to employment in specific industries, and the availability of housing.

“All these things can interact and by mapping it out, we can give people a clearer picture on how we can prepare for the energy transition.”

Scenario modelling

Given the wide-ranging pathways towards net zero, the model allows for various scenarios to be built.

The first scenario is continuing the status quo. The second is where the region establishes large-scale green hydrogen production without coordinated planning; and the final one is a really coordinated economic diversification in the region.

“These scenarios give people an idea of what might happen if the region chooses to go down a particular pathway towards zero emissions – the effect it might have on community support for the transition or the availability of jobs and healthcare, for example.

“They help stakeholders understand potential synergies and trade-offs with each of those approaches and to think holistically about planning this transition at a regional level, instead of just thinking about different projects in isolation.”

Community involvement

After workshopping these scenarios with business and government stakeholders, UTAS hopes to invite input from communities.

“This is something we’re really excited about,” Robert said. “At the moment, as a small pilot, we’ve only sought involvement from businesses and government, but expanding into the community will really help the model develop. It will help complete the picture and reveal areas of overlap between social and economic consequences.”

Once the map has that input built into it, it will become a tool for community engagement.

“We’re working with a company that puts these complicated systems maps into an online software platform which people could access and mess around with, in quite an intuitive, interactive way. They can explore what might happen to the tourism sector if a big new energy project brings in lots of new interstate workers. Or they can see what the future might look like in the region if we don’t reduce our emissions and develop future-focused industries.

“It’s potentially a really powerful way of visualising regional impact.”

Advantages over a proponent-led approach

Participatory systems mapping offers advantages over more traditional approaches to community engagement, which tend to be proponent-led.

“When led by proponents, community consultation is inherently very focused on that specific project. That becomes a problem when you have a bunch of these projects going on in a region, which affect people in multiple ways,” Robert said.

“We think it’s important to understand the cumulative effects of these projects, looking at how communities might be impacted if a few hundred interstate workers are recruited for one project and another few hundred for another.

“We need to think about how all of those numbers add up together to impact things like rentals in the region, car hire, school places, GP appointments, all that sort of stuff.”

Challenges

Given how innovative the mapping is, Robert admits there have been challenges in rolling it out.

“It can be tricky to explain the value of this approach because it doesn’t produce exact numbers. It won’t tell you exactly how many extra childcare places you need for each green infrastructure investment dollar that comes into the region. It’s about a qualitative understanding of broad trends. But the stakeholders we have been working with have been great – they’re very committed to making sure that we can plan strategically for a better future in the region.”

The nature of the project is also difficult to fund – and soon funding will be essential to help it progress.

“It has broad and diffuse benefits across a lot of different sectors and groups. It’s not like we can give an exact quantifiable number of immediate beneficiaries.

“It’s this broader idea that if we’re all understanding the region and planning together in a more holistic way that we’ll get better outcomes in future. But that’s not quantifiable right now.”

Further insight

Sharing more on the pilot program, Robert and his colleague Philippa Hammond from the CSIRO will present at the upcoming Energy Infrastructure and Community Engagement Conference.

Register your tickets here.