Guiding the sustainable development of offshore renewables and other emerging marine industries in Australia

This project established inventories of existing environmental and cultural data and best-practice monitoring for continental shelf waters in the regions of Australia’s six priority areas for offshore wind. These areas are Hunter and Illawarra (NSW); Gippsland and Southern Ocean (Vic); Bass Strait (Tas); and the Indian Ocean off Bunbury (WA).

The information and project recommendations are available to assist regulators, development proponents and researchers in assessing, mitigating and monitoring the potential environmental effects of offshore wind farm activities during the development, operation, and decommissioning phases.

Approach and findings

This project was guided by a steering committee comprised of representatives from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, and Marine and Coastal Hub partners involved in this project.

Knowledge base and data inventories

The project team identified existing information relevant to regulatory decision-making with respect to Australia’s six priority areas for offshore wind and their surrounding regions. They also reviewed knowledge and experience from the United States and Europe to better understand the potential environmental impacts of developing and operating offshore wind farms.

The collated information includes:

• seabed mapping (bathymetry), geomorphology and sedimentology, including shallow sub-seabed profiling, substrate composition and seabed habitats;
• descriptions of the key oceanographic features;
• the distribution of priority threatened, migratory and marine species within each offshore wind farm region, and gaps in species data;
• Indigenous communities and their environmental and cultural values;
• best-practice practice standards for surveys and monitoring to support mitigation, management and regulation;
• potential noise impacts, and effects on oceanography and sediments; and
• a searchable resource database of literature on the potential impacts of offshore wind farm installation, operation, and decommissioning.

Four database inventories generated by this project include more than 500 publications relating to 16 offshore wind farm impacts. These provide collated information on species, bathymetry-sediments, best-practice standards and impacts. Seabed, oceanographic and species information is also summarised in maps (geomorphology, species presence) and tables (species presence, seasonality). Species spatial data is hosted on Seamap Australia.

Three short case studies examine potential issues with transferring international experience to Australia. They cover impulsive noise from pile-driving on receptors, the effect of Australia’s seabed substrate on the foundation requirements to install and operate a wind turbine, and assessment of oceanographic impacts.

Summary of recommendations

The project report provides recommendations on data acquisition and management, and coordination of research investment.

Additional data acquisition

High resolution bathymetric data and structured ecological survey data is limited for the continental shelf and slope of most Australian offshore wind farm regions. Additional bathymetric, geomorphologic and biological survey data is required to understand potential impacts and risks associated with seabed features, and support the establishment of baseline sites for monitoring.

Best-practice standards for data acquisition

Investment in best-practice standards for seabed data acquisition is required to reduce bias and variability in sample data. This would raise confidence in the evaluation of environmental values and impacts and enable integration across proponent locations and areas that, for example, could enable the assessment of cumulative impacts and comparison with reference locations (such as marine parks).

A broader adoption of findable, accessible, interoperable and re-useable (FAIR) management of data is required for threatened species, including the provision of data through public platforms.

Potential for dynamic data inventories

The data inventories produced in this project have the potential to be transformed into a dynamic resource that captures information at all levels of the activity-exposure-response relationship, or the’ impact pathway’. This would require subject matter expertise and systematic literature searches across the many combinations of activity, stressor, and receptor responses.

Coordinated research investment

A coordinated Australian offshore wind farm research program run by a consortium of government, industry and other stakeholders and involving transparent peer-review would be an effective way to address scientific questions. Such coordination would encourage the funding of small, medium and large research studies in the knowledge that they are contributing to a greater outcome.

Assessing cumulative impacts

Assessing the cumulative effects of offshore wind farms from construction to decommissioning will require assessment methods that consider ecological connectivity at regional scales. (This is being addressed in hub Project 4.7).

Traditional Owner engagement

Traditional Owners should be engaged early in the development process. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and principles for engagement developed by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies provide guidance.

Outcomes

The knowledge and data products and recommendations from this project support decision-making under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 and the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Act 2021. These are the primary legal frameworks applicable to offshore wind farms.

They contribute to:

• the adoption of standardised, transparent methods for collecting comparable data;
• environmental assessment, mitigation and monitoring of offshore wind farm potential impacts;
• community trust in offshore wind farm research;
• research prioritisation for the assessment of cumulative impacts across multiple locations and sectors; and
• the effectiveness of future research and monitoring for biodiversity conservation, protected area management and regional planning.

Project location

Priority offshore wind farm regions around Australia