| Home | Current Issue | Archive | Instructions to Authors | Journals |

Year: 2026 | Month: November | Volume: 13 | Issue: 11 | Pages: 113-142

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20261111

Renewable Energy Transition and Biodiversity Conservation in Indonesia: A Review of Ecological Impacts, Spatial Planning and Governance, with Implications for Gorontalo

Sudarmanto Hasan¹, Dewi K. Baderan², Sukirman Rahim³, Marini Susanti⁴, Asda Rauf⁵

¹Doctoral Program in Environmental Science, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Gorontalo, Indonesia,
^2,3,4,5Postgraduate Program, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Gorontalo, Indonesia.

Corresponding Author: Sudarmanto Hasan

ABSTRACT

Indonesia is building its energy transition in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, yet the people who site power plants and the people who plan protected areas rarely read each other's work. We set out to bring these two literatures together, with a close look at Sulawesi and Gorontalo in the Wallacea region. Six Scopus searches (2021–2026, English-language articles and reviews) returned 1,181 records. After removing duplicates we screened 1,072 against explicit criteria and retained 220, of which 106 form the core corpus. We grouped the evidence into five themes: ecological impacts of renewable energy and transition minerals, renewable energy (RE) siting, land competition, conservation planning and governance. Studies of hydropower, geothermal plants and nickel mining document fragmentation, forest loss and contamination, but most are short, site-specific and set in Java. Of 36 RE siting studies, only two mention protected areas or biodiversity in their abstracts; the rest treat land cover as a generic criterion. The mirror image holds in conservation science: Marxan, species distribution models and InVEST are well established, yet they almost never model energy infrastructure as a threat. Bioenergy targets and nickel extraction emerge as the heaviest land-use pressures, and geothermal projects in conservation forests keep generating conflict. In Gorontalo, energy-system models, land-use projections and biodiversity surveys all exist, but in parallel. We propose a biodiversity-inclusive spatial optimisation framework that applies ecological exclusions and sensitivity costs before multi-criteria siting and energy-system modelling, and we set out a research agenda for Wallacea.

Keywords: energy transition; biodiversity conservation; spatial planning; multi-criteria decision analysis; Wallacea; Indonesia

[PDF Full Text]

Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) .