The article presents a review of the research on green hydrogen from the social sciences, identifying its main lines of research, its problems, and the relevant challenges due to the benefits and impacts that this energy vector has on energy transitions and climate change. The review analyzes a corpus of 78 articles indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and SCOPUS, published between 1997 and 2022. The review identified three research areas related to green hydrogen and the challenges for the social sciences in the future: (a) risks, socio-environmental impacts, and public perception; (b) public policies and regulation and (c) social acceptance and willingness to use associated technologies. Our results show that Europe and Asia lead the research on green hydrogen from the social sciences. Also, most of the works focus on the area of public policy and regulation and social acceptance. Instead, the field of social perception of risk is much less developed. We found that little research from the social sciences has focused on assessments of the social and environmental impacts of hydrogen on local communities and indigenous groups, as well as the participation of local authorities in rural locations. Likewise, there are few integrated studies (technical and social) that would allow a better assessment of hydrogen and cleaner energy transitions. Finally, the lack of familiarity with this technology in many cases constitutes a limitation when evaluating its acceptance.

In the context of climate change, a significant increase in the flood risk is expected, which may lead to an intensification of the social impacts of disasters. Social impacts significantly affect the recovery processes of individuals, social groups, and institutions in the medium and long term. Hence, the management of such impacts throughout the disaster life cycle is essential. International institutions and frameworks for disaster risk reduction have claimed the need to generate tools for the systematic assessment and management of social impacts of floods. Recently, an innovative line of research has emerged aimed at adapting social impact assessment (SIA), usually directed at the evaluation of planned interventions (programs, plans and projects), to the field of environmental disasters. In order to contribute to academic efforts in this emerging field, this paper puts forward, through a systematic literature review based on Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) criteria, an SIA methodological proposal for the identification, assessment and systematic management of the social impacts of flood events. This methodological proposal covers the three phases of the disaster cycle: (1) pre-event (preparedness), allowing the anticipation of potential impacts and supporting the proposal of preventive measures; (2) event (response), facilitating a strategic mobilization of resources and technical support towards previously identified critical disaster areas; and (3) post-event (recovery), evaluating the evolutionary dynamics of impacts, proposing measures to avoid their socio-territorial embedding and accelerating recovery processes. This tool is designed for strategic use by policy makers and managers responsible for flood risk management and regional development.

The so-called lifestyle migration represents a socio-cultural and spatial phenomenon that has become particularly important in mountain and large-lake areas of the Chilean Northern Patagonia. To examine the consequences and repercussions that this type of mobility had in the places of destination, we have used semi-structured interviews of the incoming migrant population. The analysis of the data collected enabled us to show that the initiatives, undertakings and practices deployed by the migrants exhibit important degrees of creativity that are associated with the re-signification of places. These elements suggest that the new residents acquire a role that we have denominated agents of transformation.

In the last decade, more than 1,500,000 ha have been declared as projects of environmental conservation in Chile, one tenth of the surface that the State has accumulated in protected territories for conservation in almost one century. The novelty is that these are private initiatives by environmental philanthropists and NGOs that have bought vast extensions of land in the Chilean south austral macroregion. This phenomenon opens a series of questions for environmental studies, because it tensions the state institutions dedicated to conservation and reconfigures environmental governance. The article examines three private conservation projects in the south of Chile and analyzes the implications that these have provoked on the traditional forms of governance in which the State has had an exclusive role. The results of the research show the emergency of new environmental governance in which new actors intervene in different scales. In this new scenario, the Non-Governmental Organizations play a decisive role. The work is an exploratory study from social sciences that attempts to contribute to environmental governance studies by examining the role of non-State actors in the definition of sectorial policies and indices of conservation.

This article presents a systematic review of sustainable watershed management at the international level. Based on the risk regulation approach, this review approaches the specific gaps in the literature related to relevant issues outlining the international freshwater resources socio-environmental regulation issue, especially in regards to its sociological dimensions: the organizational capabilities of agents involved in regulatory efforts, issue-implicit challenges, and regulatory effort-generated socio-environmental risks. The study identifies the reflexive components of the involved institutions, outlines the deployment of organizational processes in normative regulatory components, and explores the modalities for addressing change and complexity in the regulatory field. A corpus of 64 articles published in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases between 2021 and 2024 was analyzed, and the following findings are demonstrated: (1) regulatory requirements emerge across the three dimensions due to sociological factors, with the need for broad-ranging coordination capacities and socio-technical improvements highlighted, (2) while high political–technical capacities are exhibited by regulatory agents in the field of study, significant regulatory challenges persist, complicating the sustainable management of watersheds, and (3) decision-making based on socio-environmental risks is deemed feasible within the field of study, enabling advancements in techno-scientific and socio-political areas, although achieving this is considered challenging. It is concluded that sustainable watershed management can be better understood when the risk-based approach is used as an explanatory framework, particularly in priority areas for addressing—and regulating—the global and local dilemmas involved in governing water resources. As this field has been scarcely examined from this perspective, a series of potential research avenues with substantial scope are faced by the social sciences. Socio-environmental challenges related to water should be rigorously analyzed in future studies through innovative approaches, with the social components of the issue prioritized.