Examining the “Triple Challenge” in offshore wind farms in the UK

Lydia Anderlini

30th October 2023

2 minutes read

My name is Lydia Anderlini and I just finished my integrated masters degree at Oxford, finishing with a Master’s project with ICCS, supervised by Prof. EJ Milner-Gulland and Dr. Hollie Booth. I am now working as a Civil Servant in the Cabinet Office hoping to eventually work on biodiversity, food, and climate policy.
My project focused on examining the “Triple Challenge” in offshore wind farms in the UK. The triple challenge is the challenge of addressing climate and biodiversity goals while maintaining human well-being and ensuring that solutions to the climate and biodiversity crisis are equitable.

I interviewed a series of offshore wind farm industry experts, policy makers, fishermen, and ecologists to see what perceptions they had about the expanding offshore wind industry in the UK. I used these interviews to inform policy recommendations, summarised here.

The project was a very interesting experience for me to look at what is generally considered to be a good thing (green energy) through the lens of the people and environments it may affect negatively in the short term.

Green energy is continuously growing and improving, and will be a key way that we are able to address the climate crisis, but the immediate effects are not always considered. The future of green energy will be impacted by politics, economics, and technological advances, and will be impossible to predict. This project showed me that as green energy technologies change and improve, the people and places they affect need to be considered and addressed in a consistent and equitable way.

The full thesis is linked here and the policy report is linked here.