• Wind energy has grown rapidly in Brazil. • Target areas for wind energy also overlap with biodiversity conservation priorities. • We identified sensitive areas for wind farm installation across Brazil. • Wind turbines, protected areas, and endangered species show spatial overlap. • Findings reinforce the urgent need for stronger environmental licensing frameworks. Although considered a clean energy source, wind energy can negatively impact wildlife. This situation is more worrying in countries with high wind potential and ecologically sensitive areas, like Brazil. Here, our goal was to identify sensitive areas for globally threatened amphibians, birds, and reptiles in Brazil. We overlapped shapefiles of protected areas, endangered species, and wind farms to delimit areas of potential conflicts for conservation, projecting those datasets into 0.5-degree grid cells. Our results revealed no apparent tendency for areas with higher densities of wind turbines to overlap with greater richness of endangered species, although a moderate negative correlation was observed for bird species richness. Although there is no positive correlation with endangered species richness, there is still notable spatial overlap between wind energy generation, protected areas, and endangered species. While we do not intend to question the logic behind the expansion of renewable energies and their notable environmental benefits, we emphasize that the negative impacts on biodiversity must be considered in wind energy development. For wind energy to achieve this goal, it is crucial to promote more effective environmental licensing. Given the rapid expansion of wind energy in Brazil and worldwide, addressing these concerns is crucial to minimizing impacts on threatened amphibians, birds, and reptiles, which are declining globally.
Oliveira et al. (Thu,) studied this question.