Book Description

The transition towards an environmentally sustainable society involves a substantial transformation of the configuration of the energy system, and therefore, it entails a significant shift in planning process strategy. Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), an instrument which is strategic in nature, is recognised internationally as a systematic decision support process, aiming to ensure that environmental and possibly other sustainability aspects are considered effectively in Policy, Plan and Programme (PPP) making, i.e., in those planning tools that precede the project in the decision-making process and surpass it in terms of spatial and thematic scope and level of abstraction. From this perspective, and taking into consideration the current state of environmental assessment in Mexico as a basis of knowledge and understanding, this research proposes an innovative Strategic Environmental Assessment methodological framework applied to renewable energy, while looking upon the current transition process as a matter of interest, as well as the strategies and public policies proposed by governmental bodies. All this aimed at creating mechanisms that allow the effective execution of policies in the field of green energies. It can be assumed that this doctoral dissertation supports the need for further experimentation on SEA, developing an alternative approach that integrates knowledge and tools of Collective Intelligence, Complexity Theory and Geoprospective, via the implementation of a technological Group-Spatial Decision Support System (GSDSS) usable for decision support and/or scenario building for infrastructure project planning, that operates through interdisciplinary consensus of a multidisciplinary group of experts, without strict dependency on a spatial analysis based on a single cognitive stance, not either retrospective analysis using only existing historical data. Thus, this work addresses a study case on planning of wind energy in Mexico, which has been developed through a collaborative Geoweb application, functioning in a distributed and asynchronous real-time way, so-called Geospatial System of Collective Intelligence (SIGIC).