Threats to the Historic Cultural Landscape and Renewable Energy
Abstract: Historic cultural landscapes represent an undoubted value that must be cared for and protected. This article presents the various threats that cultural landscapes face today, both natural and anthropogenic. Natural ones include phenomena related to climate change: Drought (prolonged drought, wildfires...), water (flash and regional floods, torrential rainfall, hail, snow...), wind (hurricane, tornado, wind gusts, X windless storms, inversions, smog), frost (icing, ice, holomfrost) or pests (bark beetle, beaver, invasive plants and animals). Anthropogenic risks include urbanisation and suburbanisation (urban sprawl, residential and commercial - logistics, transport, warehouses, etc. ), peripheralisation (land degradation, land abandonment, overgrowth, ruderalisation, extensification of use incl. brownfields, blackfields, urban periphery, etc.), opencast mining incl. reclamation (quarries, stone quarries, sand pits, brickworks, etc. ), transport and technical infrastructure (high-speed lines, motorways, expressways, relocations, bypasses, transmitters, water works - reservoirs, canals, flood protection measures - dams, polders, dry reservoirs, etc.), but also new forms of agriculture (agrivoltaics, intensive orchards, plantations of energy trees, agroforestry, etc.). Conflicts and threats to cultural landscapes have occurred in the past, but today brings challenges unprecedented in previous eras. Probably the biggest and most conflicting issue of the pre-sent day is the siting of renewable energy plants (wind farms, wind parks, photovoltaic plants, geo-thermal plants, etc.), especially wind and photovoltaic plants, which represent an unprecedented and significantly excessive encroachment on the traditional cultural landscape. It therefore seems necessary to assess the qualities and limits of the landscape in advance in order to identify areas where a compromise can be found between the legitimate requirements for renewable resources and the equally legitimate protection of landscape values. The text presents two large-scale studies, of the Moravian-Silesian and Hradec Králové regions, which attempt to answer these very topical questions in both a negative form (where no) and a positive form (where yes or rather yes).
