Hosted by the Department of Earth and Environmental Science.
Co-locating solar photovoltaics with native vegetation or agriculture (agrivoltaics, ecovoltaics, multi-use solar) offers a promising pathway to meet growing food and energy demands while enhancing landscape sustainability. Here we examine multi-use solar systems across diverse global sites integrating crops, biofuel production, grazing, and pollinator-friendly vegetation, and assess their environmental and socio-economic co-benefits. We find that these systems can enhance agricultural resilience, support biodiversity, and enable economic diversification, while moderating microclimatic extremes by homogenizing soil moisture and buffering soil temperature. We further evaluate the potential of small-scale community agrivoltaics in urban and geographically isolated rural communities, where multi-use solar can improve food security and expand access to renewable energy. On agricultural lands with existing carbon debt, agrivoltaics can contribute to carbon sequestration while revitalizing degraded soils, generating income from underutilized land, and creating habitat for pollinators; however, these co-benefits are strongly site-dependent, governed by local climate and soil conditions. Although soil carbon sequestration potential is constrained by biophysical limits and scalability challenges, soil restoration under agrivoltaics can deliver sustained reductions in irrigation and fertilizer demand. By moving beyond a narrow focus on carbon storage, our findings highlight broader ecosystem and socio-economic benefits, with implications for land-use policy, carbon accounting frameworks, and the design of low-impact solar infrastructure, and help align renewable energy expansion with rural development and agricultural sustainability goals.
Sujith Ravi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Temple University, where he leads interdisciplinary research at the intersection of land, water, climate, and sustainability. His work explores how human activity and natural disturbances — from agriculture to wildfires — shape our soil, water, and vegetation, and what that means for building a more resilient food and energy future. He holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences (Hydrology) from the University of Virginia and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. Dr. Ravi a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award and has been honored for excellence in scientific scholarship, peer review, and mentoring. Dr. Ravi also serves as the Associate Editor of two journals: Journal of Geophysical Research (American Geophysical Union) and Ecosphere (Ecological Society of America). His research has been featured in leading journals such as Nature Sustainability, Nature, Water Resources Research, Global Change Biology, Reviews of Geophysics, Earths Future, Journal of Geophysical Research, Environmental Science & Technology, and Water Research.