Birds & the poop on solar panels: does solar harm avian biodiversity? – Animals 24-7

Chinese birders refute study claiming  that “China’s Solar Expansion Policy Reduces Bird Diversity”

NANJING, China;  HONG KONG;  SINGAPORE––”China’s Solar Expansion Policy Reduces Bird Diversity,”  a study led by a Chinese professor with no background in either ornithology or avian ecology,  but with a history of doing research linked to the coal industry,  rattled solar panels around the world after appearing in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science on August 20,  2026.

The findings were immediately amplified globally,  especially by media supportive of coal use.  Coal still supplies about 35% of the energy used to produce electricity worldwide,  but has rapidly lost market share to solar and wind,  and is fighting competition from solar and wind on every inhabited continent.

Vultures on roadkill

Solar and wind together produced less than 2% of the world’s electricity in 2000,  but now produce 13%.

The decline in Chinese use of coal has been even steeper.  Coal produced 60% of the Chinese electricity supply in 2011,  but only 48% in 2025.

Yet “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,”  as Jonathan Swift observed circa 1710,  well before the invention of electronic media.

So can a study that doesn’t hold up.

Within days a flock of critics led by the China Ornithological Society were picking apart “China’s Solar Expansion Policy Reduces Bird Diversity” like vultures on a roadkill.

Protested lead study author Huiming Zhang,  of the Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology,  to Agence France Presse,  “The main message is not to slow the renewable energy transition,  but to make solar development more ecologically informed.”

Compared birding data to local energy policies

Perhaps China’s most prominent energy economist,  Huiming Zhang has led many studies and published many papers pertaining to both coal use to generate electricity and use of solar and wind energy.  But a look at his bibliography suggests a tilt toward continuing to develop Chinese coal fields,  currently producing about half of the total global coal supply,  even as China also leads the world in solar development.

“China’s Solar Expansion Policy Reduces Bird Diversity,”  explained the abstract,  “examined the effect of policies promoting solar photovoltaics on local avian biodiversity,”  using data gathered from 2,344 counties in China between 2014 and 2023.

“Policies that favored photovoltaic expansion led to reductions in bird diversity, disproportionately affecting wealthier and non-desert regions,  as well as widespread species,”  Huiming Zhang and co-authors alleged.

“Inferior greening”

“The mechanism operated primarily through land conversion:  cropland and grassland were transformed into developed areas,  reducing the diversity of vegetation,”  suggested Huiming Zhang and co-authors.

“Paradoxically,”  Huiming Zhang and co-authors continued,  “the leaf area index increased,  a pattern we term ‘inferior greening,’  whereby diverse natural landscapes were replaced by dense but ecologically homogeneous vegetation.  We argue that future photovoltaic development should be accompanied by strict biodiversity safeguards,  especially in economically developed regions with high habitat complexity.”

Offered Issam Ahmed for PhysOrg,  an online science and technology periodical published since 2004,  “China’s goal to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 has seen it embark on a renewables revolution,”  largely meaning replacing coal with solar energy wherever possible.

“Solar footprint”

“By 2024,”  Issam Ahmed observed,  the Chinese “solar footprint,”  meaning the area occupied by solar panels,  “reached an estimated 1,745 square miles—equivalent in size to the U.S. state of Rhode Island—and solar energy is projected to constitute 45% of its energy mix by 2060.”

Unfortunately,  Ahmed wrote,  “Choosing solar locations in China is not based on sunshine and available land,  but rather on government ‘Five-Year Plans’ to promote economic development in certain regions.”

Further,  Chinese solar development has so far relied much more heavily on “solar farms,”  or vast arrays of solar panels blanketing landscapes,  feeding electricity into existing transmission grids,  than on rooftop solar,  which in most efficient form,  bypasses transmission grids by storing electricity in batteries for use at or near the point of generation.

“The average effect [on birds],”  of covering land with solar panels,  “is modest,  but it is meaningful when it occurs systematically across many counties,”  Zhang Huiming and co-authors said in a media statement.

Birding records

Explained Phil McKenna for Inside Climate News,  “In their multi-step assessment, the researchers first collected official solar-related directives from provincial,  city,  and county government websites.

“They then collected ‘citizen science’ bird-watching records from across the country. These records were fed into the Shannon Index,  a formula frequently used to assess biodiversity based on the number of species observed and how evenly individuals are distributed among them.

“Comparing the two indexes revealed how policies supporting solar power development impacted avian communities.

“Compare solar to coal & oil”

Amanda Rodewald,  senior director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell University Ornithology Laboratory,  emailed to McKenna that,  “In North America,  we see similar patterns where species diversity often declines in areas developed for [solar energy collection],  due to loss of sensitive/specialist species.”

“However,”  McKenna continued,  “Rodewald said that species diversity can also increase after landscapes are initially fragmented.  She cautioned that bird species diversity may not necessarily be the most meaningful measure of the health of avian species in an area.

“Rodewald added that while some may be tempted to use the study’s findings to challenge renewable energy development,”  McKenna paraphrased,  “it is important to compare the effects of such projects with those of conventional energy sources like coal and oil,  which have steep environmental consequences,”  including for birds,  from the proverbial canaries in coal mines to the sea birds who die in oil spills at the rate of half a million to a million per year,  worldwide.

Zhang and co-authors acknowledged by email,  McKenna wrote,  that “Using rooftop solar in habitat-rich regions and restoring diverse native vegetation,  rather than relying only on simple greening targets,”  could mitigate the alleged avian biodiversity losses due to “solar farming.”

Missing data is not the same thing as zero birds

Huiming Zhang and co-authors were fiercely rebutted,  eleven days after “China’s Solar Expansion Policy Reduces Bird Diversity” appeared,  by Oliver Zhen Li of National University of Singapore and Shirley Jiexuan Wang,  who are respectively an economist and a systems analyst.

            “We revisit this issue and conclude that there is no evidence of this being the case,”  began Wang and Li.  “If we assume that Zhang et al’s data treatment is true and fair,  then they have ignored the fact that fences around solar farms can deny birdwatching access,  mechanically causing observed bird diversity to decline.

“However,  and more importantly,”  Li and Wang argued,  zeroing in on statistical methodology,  “the negative link between bird diversity and solar photovoltaic policy stringency claimed by Zhang et al is likely due to missing-data treatment-setting miss values to zero.

“Without setting missing values to zero,”  Li and Wang found,  “the correlation between solar photovoltaic policy intensity and solar photovoltaic activities is negative.

Finished Li and Wang,  “Zhang et al‘s conclusion can potentially misguide sustainability efforts and energy policies in China as well as the rest of the world.”

China Ornithological Society warns of “potential errors”

Even more damaging to “China’s Solar Expansion Policy Reduces Bird Diversity” should be the critique issued by the China Ornithological Society,  whose members were the major source of the data used by Zhang et al.

“The data used to plug into a bird diversity index,”  the index used by Zhang et al,  “was taken from the China Birdwatching Record Centre,  the largest citizen-science platform for bird observations in the country,”  explained Victoria Bela for the South China Morning Post on September 6,  2026.

The China Ornithological Society,  however,  “warned of potential errors in the China Birdwatching Record Centre’s records,  which it said may have influenced”  the conclusions of Zhang et al.

Egrets & magpies

The China Ornithological Society,  summarized Bela,  “pointed to a logged observation in 2015 of 2.1 billion little egrets in a wetland,  and another in 2022 of 1.3 billion red-billed blue magpies in a park,  both in Guangdong province.

“While there is no exact census for these species,  historical estimates show that those numbers far exceed their entire global populations.  A 2023 Wetlands International estimate placed the global little egret population at up to around three million,”  only 1.4% of the number supposedly found in a single wetland.

The China Ornithological Society,  reported Bela,   “said that despite the data clearly exceeding ‘reasonable limits,’  it was still included” in the estimate of avian biodiversity that Zhang et al used to allege a decline.

“China’s Solar Expansion Policy Reduces Bird Diversity,”  charged the China Ornithological Society,  “provides no information on birdwatching data quality control,  making it impossible to accurately assess the reasonableness of the data used for analysis.”

Birdwatching boom

Detailed Jiang Xinyi for the Shanghai-based online periodical SixthTone.com,  “Among the issues, over 40% of the over 500,000 reports collected during the nine years [worth of data used by Zhang et al] recorded the presence of species using the number 1,”  instead of entering a count.  This does not actually mean “that only one bird was seen,”  the China Ornithological Society said,  “making the data unreliable.”

“Meanwhile,  the original study may have removed some migratory waterbirds’ records at wintering sites as statistical outliers,  as they recorded tens of thousands of birds at a given location, ‘potentially underestimating true bird diversity,’”  the China Ornithological Society explained.

“The China Ornithological Society also noted,”   Jiang Xinyi continued,  “that birdwatching records surged between 2021 and 2023 amid a growing birdwatching boom in the country,  just as authorities were introducing significant solar policies.  This,  it argued,  makes it difficult to determine whether changes in biodiversity data were driven by increased birdwatching or photovoltaic development.”

“A man has to know his limitations.”

Ma Zhijun,  deputy director of the China Ornithological Society and a professor at the Fudan University School of Life Sciences,  told Jiang Xinyi,  Jiang Xinyi paraphrased,  that “Easy availability of birdwatching datasets has led researchers without a background in bird ecology to use them without fully understanding their limitations.”

Longer birdwatching time,  the China Ornithological Society added,  had a greater influence on observed avian biodiversity than anything having to do with solar policy.

Concluded the China Ornithological Society,  “We believe that this paper has flaws in data usage and statistical bias,  and cannot support the conclusion that China’s photovoltaic expansion policy has reduced bird diversity.”

Science has “potential concerns”

Science communications director Meagan Phelan acknowledged on August 27,  2026 that “potential concerns related to this paper have reached our attention.”

“We are evaluating them following our normal processes,”  Phelan said.  “We will reach the authors.  If any adjustments are required,  we will certainly make them.”

“Ken Rosenberg,  a conservation scientist at Cornell University who was not involved in the research,  says bird diversity measures can be misleading,”  reported Mary Randolph for Scientific American,  “as they can obscure how well a specific local bird population is actually doing. Future research might look at bird population numbers instead,  he says.

Rosenberg conceded,  however,  that the analysis by Zhang et al was “the first he has seen,”  Randolph wrote,  “that has looked at the relationship between solar policy and biodiversity on a national level.”

“No form of human development leaves nature untouched”

Hou Liqiang,  writing for China Daily,  the official Chinese government newspaper,   pointed out that,  “No form of human development leaves nature untouched,  and solar power is no exception. Almost every modern infrastructure — be it roads,  cities,  farms,  mines and dams — reshapes ecosystems in one way or another.”

The question raised by Zhang et al,  Hou Liqiang suggested,  “is not whether solar energy development has any adverse ecological effect,  but how that effect should be assessed and reduced in a broader balance sheet.

“Some Western media outlets have framed the study in highly negative terms,”  Hou Liqiang observed,  “with one headline saying solar panels in China are ‘killing’ bird diversity.  The wording might be eye-catching,  but it risks turning a complex governance issue into a simplistic accusation.  The study itself does not conclude that solar power is inherently harmful.  Nor does it deny the significant role that renewable energy plays in mitigating the threat from climate change that has been looming larger.

“Climate change itself is destroying habitats”

“After all,  climate change itself is triggering extreme weather events and destroying habitats, exacerbating global biodiversity loss,”  Hou Liqiang reminded.  “By mitigating climate change, the development of solar energy can play an important role in promoting biodiversity conservation.”

Agreed Darren Orf for Yahoo.com,  “Renewable energy is the solution for the climate crisis. Severely curtailing carbon emissions while harnessing the free energy provided by the fusion reactor known as our Sun (in the form of solar power) or the wind blowing across the plains is a clear win-win for humanity,  but that doesn’t mean that energy sources like this don’t come with downsides that require careful consideration.

“For instance,  400-foot-tall wind turbines and sprawling photovoltaic arrays need space, often to the detriment of the wild animals that rely on those once-undisturbed habitats.”

“We have more than enough rooftops”

But Ted Clifton of Zero Energy Plans,  a pioneering solar builder and brother and brother-in-law of the ANIMALS 24-7 team,  argues that the whole premise that solar conversion requires “sprawling photovoltaic arrays” eating into wildlife habitat and farmland is just plain wrong.

“I have never been a fan of ground-mounted arrays,”  Ted Clifton emailed,  “as we have more than enough rooftops,  especially in warehouse districts,  to supply all the power we need,  closer to the actual point of use.

“In very far northern climates,”  Ted Clifton continued,  “ground-mounted arrays can be set steep enough to dump snow,  and still be effective during the winter months,  but otherwise we should be keeping them on rooftops.”

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