Landscape quality has become a fundamental issue in the development of renewable energy (henceforth abbreviated RE) projects. Rapid technological advances in RE production and distribution, coupled with changing policy frameworks, bring specific challenges during planning in order to avoid degradation of landscape quality. The current work provides a comprehensive review on RE landscapes and the impacts of RE systems on landscape for most European countries. It is based on a review by an interdisciplinary international team of experts of empirical research findings on landscape impacts of RE from thirty-seven countries that have participated in the COST Action TU1401 Renewable Energy and Landscape Quality (RELY).

Recent decades have witnessed the burgeoning of diverse international treaties on landscape (European Landscape Convention = ELC, 2000; Latin American Landscape Initiative = LALI, 2013). Their influence leads to a growing need for landscape classification in all signatory countries. In Spain, the ELC has encouraged the incorporation of landscape to land planning. As a result, concepts and methods have been put forward integrating taxonomies and inventories within a common hierarchical structure. This trend is sponsored by epistemic currents conceiving landscape as a continuous cognitive object, whose semblance is modulated by the scale of contemplation. Simultaneously some pragmatic requirements arise from the need to frame landscape policy to fit different spatial spheres for decision-making and public participation; recent instrumentation and automation developments push in the same direction, although landscape contains an irreducible core where subjectivity and expert opinion are dominant factors. Such are the circumstances leading to the present proposal, whose ambition is to revive the discussion on landscape classification focusing on subsidiarity. A multi-level taxonomic procedure is described, where landscape description offers the opportunity to relate levels of land use and landscape policy decision-making to appropriate landscape unit levels.