Impact Analysis of Hydropower: Exploring New Projects and Existent Installations Using Sustainability Assessment Tools

Sustainability has increasingly become a key policy goal, mainly as an answer that the current path of modern societies in not viable in the long term. Several assessment tools have been developed accordingly, especially focusing on the energy sector. This thesis focuses on hydropower, the main sour...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Voegeli, Guillaume
Other Authors: Romerio-Giudici, Franco, Beniston, Martin, Patel, Martin
Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
Language:English
Published: Université de Genève 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:139712
https://doi.org/10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:139712
Description
Summary:Sustainability has increasingly become a key policy goal, mainly as an answer that the current path of modern societies in not viable in the long term. Several assessment tools have been developed accordingly, especially focusing on the energy sector. This thesis focuses on hydropower, the main source of renewable power worldwide. Hydropower is in this frame explored and analyzed in four steps: 1) Investigation of diversity in water rights, and elaboration of a 9-steps process to overcome this diversity; 2) Exploration of hydropower impacts and building of causal diagrams; 3) Application of MCDA tools and stakeholder survey to analysis the future of existing hydropower installations, based on one case study; 4) Construction of causal diagrams to represents the concerns and expectations of stakeholders, based on two case studies. Globally, our results call for a systematic, early and comprehensive assessment of hydropower impacts, including multiple temporal and spatial scales.