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Booming solar energy is encroaching on cropland

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The rapid spread of solar power plants onto cropland is having increasingly detrimental impacts. Targeted policy and technological solutions are urgently needed to resolve the tension between renewable energy and food production.

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Fig. 1

Visual China (2021)

Fig. 2: The development of solar energy in China from 2000 to the present, with projections after 2020 to 2060, and associated spatial factors.

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Acknowledgements

We appreciate support from the China National Key R&D Plan (2018YFB1502804).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER), Dresden, Germany

    Ning Zhang

  2. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China

    Huabo Duan & Jiakuan Yang

  3. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Yuli Shan

  4. Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, Yale University, New Haven, USA

    T. Reed Miller

  5. Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Xuemei Bai

Authors
  1. Ning Zhang
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  2. Huabo Duan
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  3. Yuli Shan
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  4. T. Reed Miller
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  5. Jiakuan Yang
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  6. Xuemei Bai
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Correspondence to Huabo Duan or Xuemei Bai.

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Nature Geoscience thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1-3 and Supplementary Methods.

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Supplementary Tables 1-8 with sources.

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Zhang, N., Duan, H., Shan, Y. et al. Booming solar energy is encroaching on cropland. Nat. Geosci. 16, 932–934 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01304-1

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