Introduction

In today’s society, proposed industrial facilities are scrutinized for their potential impacts on the environment. Local residents, elected officials, and environmental groups ask how a new facility will affect the air, water, and wildlife. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) require environmental assessments, which include an assessment of the local social and economic implications of such facilities.

In order to ensure that multiple stakeholders opinions and concerns were included in this section, we developed two areas of research: firstly, detailing the concerns of the local residents in California desert communities regarding solar development; and secondly, performing an extensive review of socioeconomic research to date on the impacts of energy development on local communities. Each of these branches of research is broken out in further detail on the left-hand navigation bar.