The GRES project has published a new policy brief, Geografías del Sacrificio Verde: Recomendaciones para revertir las desigualdades territoriales en la Transición Energética Española (Policy Brief 12/2025). The brief introduces and analyses the concept of green sacrifice, highlighting how the current large-scale, centralized deployment of renewable energy infrastructures in Spain generates uneven environmental, social, economic, and public health burdens across territories.

Based on findings from the research project Green Sacrifice in Spain (GRES), the policy brief shows how renewable energy infrastructures tend to concentrate in demographically and economically fragile provinces, often rural and sparsely populated areas, where social resistance could be weaker. While the benefits of decarbonisation are broadly distributed, its costs remain territorially concentrated, reinforcing existing inequalities. The brief contrasts this centralized model with experiences of distributed renewable generation and proposes concrete policy recommendations to advance a more equitable, democratic, and territorially balanced energy transition.

The policy brief is authored by Sergi Saladié Gil (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), Fiammetta Brandajs di Martino, Christos Zografos, Mariana Gutiérrez-Zamora Navarro, and Joan Benach (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). The research was conducted within the Green Sacrifice in Spain (GRES) project (2023–2025), led by Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) and Next Generation EU funds.

You can access the policy brief here.