The global increase in renewable energy initiatives has been followed by the need to include the social impact of any project as a core element. Significant challenges for renewable energy development include uncertainty in assessing social impacts at local scales, participation and social acceptance. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approaches have been widely used in energy planning to address these challenges. This article reviews how social criteria and participation mechanisms have been incorporated into decision-making processes for renewable energy projects. A total of 184 articles were analyzed. A total of 490 indicators that estimated social impacts were identified and organized into nine criteria: employment, social acceptance, social development, health impact, governance, visual impact, knowledge and awareness, cultural value and social justice. Most research included analytical hierarchy process methodologies, and the articles were geographically concentrated in Asia and Europe. Most articles included a participative component (92.3%), and the majority of them were based on expert consultation (75.4%). Of the articles that exclusively considered experts, almost 40% did not provide any description of the expert elicitation process. Results revealed advances in the use of MCDA but highlighted important challenges—related to improving expert consultation methodologies and broadening the participation of stakeholders—when developing renewable energy initiatives and policies.

Agriculture could be one of the most vulnerable economic sectors to the impacts of climate change in the coming decades, with impacts threatening agricultural production in general and food security in particular. Within this context, climate change will impose a challenge to policy makers, especially in those countries that based their development on primary sectors. In this paper we present a non-linear agricultural supply model for the analysis of the economic impacts of changes in crop yields due to climate change. The model accounts for uncertainty through the use of Monte Carlo simulations about crop yields. According to our results, climate change impacts on the Chilean agricultural sector are widespread, with considerable distributional consequences across regions, and with fruits producers being worst-off than crops producers. In general, the results reported here are consistent with those reported by previous studies showing large economic impacts on the northern zone. However, our model does not simulate remarkable economic consequences at the country level as previous studies did.

During recent decades, water demand estimation has gained considerable attention from scholars. From an econometric perspective, the most used functional forms include log‐log and linear specifications. Despite the advances in this field and the relevance for policymaking, little attention has been paid to the functional forms used in these estimations, and most authors have not provided justifications for their selection of functional forms. A discrete continuous choice model of the residential water demand is estimated using six functional forms (log‐log, full‐log, log‐quadratic, semilog, linear, and Stone‐Geary), and the expected consumption and price elasticity are evaluated. From a policy perspective, our results highlight the relevance of functional form selection for both the expected consumption and price elasticity.

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Water resources are facing several stresses in terms of quantity and quality. These pressures are closely related to the human interventions in fields like: agriculture, land-use/land use change, construction/management of reservoirs, pollutant emissions, and water /wastewater treatment, among others. Considering the critical role that water plays for agricultural production, any shock in water availability will have great implications for agricultural production, and through agricultural markets these impacts will reach the whole economy with economy-wide consequences. The aim of this report is to present a literature review about the state of the art methodology regarding the study of water issues using the CGE approach at global and national scale. The analysis of the different studies confirm the economy wide consequences of changes in water allocation, irrigation policies, and climate change, among others water related issues.