Friday, October 4th, 2024 | 10:30 am – 11:50 am
Greg Barron-Gafford, Professor, School of Geography Development and Environment, University of Arizona
Location: 1605 Tilia Street, Suite 100, Davis, CA
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Global projections of increased temperature and aridity threaten our potential to achieve Sustainable Development Goals associated with food, energy, and water futures. We continuously evaluate the implications of an agrivoltaics approach – combining agriculture and solar photovoltaics – on the microclimate growing conditions of crop species. We have found that agrivoltaics mitigates the midday depression in photosynthesis experienced by crops grown in hot and arid environments, which leads to reduced water stress, equal or greater daily carbon assimilation, and equal or greater crop yield.
Our findings indicate agrivoltaics could be a climate-smart agricultural approach and a mechanism for meeting Sustainable Development Goals for food and energy production and water savings. Beyond describing these potential benefits, I will describe early results from our social science efforts to understand the potential for agrivoltaics across county, state, and regional landscapes. Further, as we have worked to maximize the benefits felt by communities, we have examined what it means to ‘scale’ agrivoltaics across a suite of global communities – offering new opportunities for experiential education, community building, and research insights.
Greg Barron-Gafford is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Southwest Borderlands Food and Water Security and an Earth System Scientist. He and his band of collaborators have been building the field of agrivoltaics – the co-location of an ‘understory’ of agriculture below an ‘overstory’ of renewable energy production. This is a novel way of linking societal needs of food and energy in a way that benefits both – all while reducing dependence on irrigation. Through this agrivoltaics approach, Barron-Gafford’s team is targeting simultaneous sustainable development goals with a singular system. Greg began his work in southern Arizona to study the benefits across the food-energy-water nexus. Today, he and his team are building an international network of community-driven agrivoltaic installations across the Southwestern US, Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, Israel, and Morocco, working to create resilience in local food access and bring energy to the many that still lack access.
