Postdoc Tradeoffs, Synergies and Conflicts Photovoltaic Panels

The postdoc project is part of the collaborative European BIODIVERSA+ project Just Bio Solar  that investigates, with a group of partner institutes across Europe, conflicts around the deployment of solar panels on agricultural lands in Europe. At VU Amsterdam we are tasked with providing a European scale overview of recurring trade-offs and conflicts in deployment of photovoltaics. Locations of documented conflict will be harvested through AI-assisted media analysis.

We will use a form of topic modelling as a method for automated content analysis. Topic models are a probabilistic method that allows organizing the contents of a text corpus into a set of semantically coherent concepts. As a data source we will use a wide range of sources including newspapers and social media and the scientific literature. Based on the obtained data we aim to make an archetypical characterization of these conflict situations and a map of locations where there is the probability of finding these archetypes.

The task collaborates with other project partners that gather in-depth insights in case studies conducted and variations in multi-level governance conditions across European countries addressed by another project partner. Outputs are an overview of archetypical situations with trade-offs between biocultural and biodiversity values and photovoltaic deployment. In addition, the WP will describe the role of contextual factors in these trade-offs and produce a European scale risk map of potential conflicts.

• you collect data, employ automated content analysis, prepare maps and exchange insights and data with other project partners
• you engage in project collaboration to add value to the European consortium and link top-down and bottom-up approaches of gathering information on conflicts surrounding photovoltaic deployment
• you collaborate with the project partners towards making the case studies comparable
• you publish high quality, peer-reviewed research in international scientific journals