AERNA Awards

The Spanish-Portuguese Association of Natural and Environmental Resources Economics (AERNA, www.aerna.org) announces the second edition of the AERNA Awards for the best Master Thesis and the best Ph.D. Thesis defended in Spain or Portugal within the field of Environmental and Resource Economics.

The aim of these awards is to recognize outstanding works of young researchers, contribute to the sensibilization of society to environmental problems and offer possible solutions based on economic approaches.

Participants must meet the two following conditions:

• Authors must have defended their Master Thesis or Ph.D. Thesis in a public or private university in Spain or Portugal in the academic years 2022-2023 or 2023-2024.
• The Master or D. Thesis must be in the field of Environmental and Resource Economics.

Categories and prizes:

– Master Thesis: €400.

– Ph.D. Thesis: €800.

Applications should be sent by email to Angel Bujosa ([email protected]) not later than 25 May, 2025 and should include documents 1 to 4 in PDF format (see below):

• Online application with the personal data of the applicant.
• Document 1: A copy of the Master or Ph.D. Thesis written in English or any of the official languages of Spain and
• Document 2: A summary of the thesis in English (1,000 to 2,000 words) including the motivation for the work, the objectives of the study, the employed methodology (description and justification), and the discussion of the results including a comparison to previous results.
• Document 3: An academic certificate that reflects the author and title of the thesis, the date of the defense, the academic year and the grade obtained.
• Document 4: A short CV.

For any additional information or clarifications please contact [email protected].

First edition of the AERNA Awards for the best Master Thesis and best PhD Thesis in the field of Environmental and Resource Economics (years 2020-2021 and 2021-2022).

For the category of Best PhD Thesis, a committee formed by Renan Goetz (chair, U. Girona), Montserrat Villadrich (U. Lleida) and Renato Rosa (U. Coimbra) has reached the unanimous decision (endorsed by the AERNA council). The winner in this category is Francesca Tomori (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) for her PhD Thesis entitled “Environmental Policies in International Markets” and supervised by Dr. Bernd Theilen and Dr. José Manuel Giménez Gómez.

For the category of best Master Thesis, ), a committee formed by Alexandra Leitão (chair, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa), Nuria Osés Eraso (Universidad Pública de Navarra) and Lennart Vogelsang (University of Graz) has reached the unanimous decision (again endorsed by the AERNA council) to give the award to Tobias Albrecht (Universitat de Barcelona), for his work entitled «Does Decentralization matter for Renewable Energy Sources?”, supervised by Dr. Enrique López-Bazo.

AERNA issues a prize of 500€ for the best paper presented at the AERNA biennial Conference by a PhD Student or a PhD holder that has defended his/her thesis at most during the last two years.

Two additional requirements must be fulfilled to be eligible:

• The candidate must present the paper at the Conference
• Papers can be co-authored although priority will be given to papers written by a single author

PAST AWARDEES

AERNA issues a prize of 1000€ for the best paper published in a scientific journal during the past two years before the year of the Conference. 

This Award recognizes exemplary original research published by AERNA members. The Award is given biennally and announced at the AERNA Conference. Two requirements are taken into account:

1. Paper: Any article published during the preceding two years is eligible for this award
2. Authors:  At least 50% of the authors must have been members of AERNA during the past two years. 

PAST AWARDEES