Avoiding costly surprises by getting bird and bat risk assessments right

Accurately assessing risk to birds and bats is a critical step in wind farm development, directly influencing project design, approvals and long-term operational obligations. While risk assessment is a familiar part of the environmental impact process for developers, there are specific aspects of bird and bat assessments that require deep technical knowledge and long timeframes to do well.

Senior Associate – Ecology, Ned Bowden, explains how projects that invest in early, broader and more iterative risk assessments as part of their broader Bird and Bat Utilisation Studies (BBUS) are better positioned to avoid delays and reduce downstream costs.

Why early risk assessment matters

Birds and bats – particularly migratory species, raptors and microbats – are commonly identified as high-risk groups for wind farms. In some cases, they can become major project constraints if not identified early enough to influence project design.

Finding them early and completing detailed risk assessment goes a long way to reducing approval risks and monitoring risks during operations. The risk assessment is the most critical of all steps and there can be real consequences for projects and species where this is not done well.

If you don’t understand the risk your project has early to bird and bats, you can’t plan to avoid or mitigate them – you also can’t design surveys to capture data of your at-risk species or groups to substantiate your risk assessment outcomes.

The risk of narrow assessments

A key issue facing many developers is the tendency to focus risk assessments primarily on threatened species.

A review we have undertaken of operating wind farms in Australia shows that projects with narrower assessments (limited to threatened species and selected raptors) were more likely to detect additional species during operational mortality monitoring that had not been previously assessed.

This often results in additional monitoring requirements, increased scrutiny from regulators and reactive mitigation measures during operations.

By contrast, projects that adopted a broader approach – such as considering non-threatened species, local populations and species identified in the literature as collision-prone – were better able to predict operational outcomes.

This is particularly important given that non-threatened species can still trigger management actions during operations, especially where impacts occur more frequently.

Plan ahead and survey effectively

Risk assessments are often initiated after initial survey campaigns. However, best practice is to begin earlier and revisit assessments throughout the 24-month baseline survey program.

Starting early allows the ecology team to identify potential high-risk species and habitat before fieldwork so they can design more targeted and efficient survey programs.

Risk is inherently site-specific so early site familiarisation to identify survey locations is important. Understanding how a project sits within the landscape—particularly in relation to habitat, movement patterns and species behaviour—is essential to producing reliable outcomes. Additionally, early identification of at-risk groups relative to landscape positioning and potentially available habitat in and around the site can enhance early design feedbacks to avoid potential high-risk areas.

Flight pathing provides valuable insight into how birds and bats interact with a site and can be implemented with relatively low effort. It helps build confidence in identifying high-risk areas and supports clearer communication of risk to regulators and stakeholders.

Key strategies to lower project risk

Well-executed risk assessments can significantly reduce project risk by informing better decisions early. The key strategies we collaborate on with our clients are:

• defining landscape context before focusing on individual species
• adopting a precautionary approach and refining it with evidence
• including non-threatened species and broader ecological factors
• aligning survey design closely with risk assessment needs
• continuously updating assessments throughout the survey program

Projects that apply these principles are more likely to avoid delays, reduce regulatory uncertainty and minimise the need for costly post-approval monitoring and mitigation.

As wind development expands across Australia, a more proactive and evidence-based approach to bird and bat risk assessment will be essential to delivering both successful projects and effective environmental outcomes.

If your project needs support with anything BBUS-related, please get in touch with our team.

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