Taking Two Crises Seriously? Exploring the Shifting Balance in Policy Integration of Renewable Energies and Biodiversity in the EU and Germany

Since 2019, the European Green Deal Strategy has ushered in a new holistic approach which seeks to harmonise efforts across several sectors towards a long-term goal of carbon neutrality. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, through the 2022 REPowerEU Plan, the EU declared an even higher level of urgency in decarbonizing the energy mix as a key means to reduce dependence on imports of Russian fossil fuels. This has led to an increased focus on accelerating the permitting process for renewable energy projects. In a 2022 Council Emergency Regulation on Renewable Permitting and the revised Renewable Energy Directive the following year, renewable energy projects have been defined as being in the overriding public interest and member states have been called upon to designate special areas in which renewable energy projects will be largely exempted from complex environmental impact assessments. While these provisions are likely to foster faster and more widespread construction of renewable energy projects, they also cause concerns about the shifting balance in favour of renewable energy deployment at the expense of environmental objective, particularly biodiversity protection. This raises the question of whether the prioritisation of renewable energy transition marks a new approach to environmental policy integration in the EU and how this is interpreted and applied at the level of member states. To shed more light on these issues, we scrutinise the recent policy changes at the EU level and in Germany focusing on the nexus between renewable energies and biodiversity and drawing on the literature on policy integration and EU governance. Our study seeks to provide a timely conceptual and empirical contribution to understanding the EU policy integration efforts in tackling multiple crises.