Diverse vegetation responses to solar farm installation are also driven by climate change

Solar farms play an integral role in the global energy transition and climate change mitigation. However, criticism has emerged, arguing that mitigating climate change cannot come at the expense of ecosystem degradation due to an ambiguous understanding of solar farms’ environmental impacts. Here we developed a harmonic regression model to conduct a nuanced global analysis of solar farms’ influences on vegetation. Results show that 52% of solar farms exhibited beneficial effects on vegetation coverage, with the highest enhancement (136.72%) found in regions where the aridity index is 0.39. However, changes in coverage are not triggered solely by solar farms; rather, there is a counterbalance between the contributions from climate change and from solar farms, implying that observed coverage changes could be stalled or even reversed in the future. Furthermore, plant functional type transition is an additional potential driver. Our findings could improve solar farm site selection and policies.