Microgrids are a rapidly evolving and increasingly common form of local power generation used to serve the needs of both rural and urban communities. In this paper, we present a methodology to evaluate the evolution of the sustainability of stand-alone microgrids projects. The proposed methodology considers a composite sustainability index (CSI) that includes both positive and negative impacts of the operation of the microgrid in a given community. The CSI is constructed along environmental, social, economic and technical dimensions of the microgrid. The sub-indexes of each dimension are aggregated into the CSI via a set of adaptive weighting factors, which indicate the relative importance of the corresponding dimension in the sustainability goals. The proposed methodology aims to be a support instrument for policy makers especially when defining sound corrective measures to guarantee the sustainability of small, isolated microgrid projects. To validate the performance of the proposed methodology, a microgrid installed in the northern part of Chile (Huatacondo) has been used as a benchmarking project.
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) represent a revolutionary conservation paradigm aimed at providing a sustainable financing for conservation, assuring the continued supply of ecosystem services (ES) for different beneficiaries while having the opportunity to improve sustainable livelihoods of rural communities providing these services. Whereas PES schemes are increasingly being developed all over the world, Peru has created a national legislative framework to operationalize them, called Rewarding Mechanisms for Ecosystem Services (MRSE), with an especial development on Hydrological Ecosystem Services (MRSEH) to sustain good quality and quantity of drinking potable water for urban areas. However, a lack of coordination, miscommunications, and unintegrated decision making process among the wide variety of stakeholders involved, especially urban (downstream water users) and rural stakeholders (ES upstream providers) has caused several challenges for the government to be implemented. This paper proposes an innovative methodology tool aimed to overcome these challenges, based on an in‐depth bottom‐up stakeholder analysis able to identify and understand those problems, and proposes sustainable win‐win upstream–downstream interventions to carry out in the future. A detailed review of the available literature on bottom‐up stakeholder participation methodology and a deep understanding of the MRSEH socio context were completed. We conclude that this methodology has the potential to be applied in any MRSEH of Peru at the design stage and also recommend that more research related with MRSEH stakeholder engagement should be conducted.
Agradecimientos iv 1 Introducción 2 Estado de la cuestión 2.1 Importancia de las turberas peruanas 2.2 Amenazas 2.3 Marco normativo 3 Oportunidades y retos 4 Recomendaciones Referencias Lista de tablas y figuras Tablas
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