Collecting inputs for the Bonn2011 Nexus Conference preparatory process

The question of how to effectively use our water resources has been debated for decades, yet what we need more than ever is direct action at the field level.

The SEI’s work on the water, energy and food security nexus – an interview with Holger Hoff

The World Water Week 2012 in Stockholm will zoom in on food security and the global water situation. This is warranted not least from the perspective of the increasing imbalances in global food security. In this article, Dr. Anders Jägerskog sums up the thrust of a report he edited on this topic, which is meant to provide input for the Week’s deliberations.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become a contentious proposal among Member States that are currently negotiating the outcome document for Rio+20. Member States and the international community are looking for the successors of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which will expire in 2015. The current framework helped the international community to rally behind a common understanding of poverty eradication, and it provided targets and indicators to guide policy decisions. However, the MDGs overemphasised economic poverty and gave limited attention to the structural causes of poverty or to sustainable development.

The Water-energy-food nexus (or other permutations) is increasingly finding itself in the public discourse surrounding development and sustainability. It is a concept that is easy to understand on the face of things, yet like a ball of wool unravels itself into a myriad of complex and dynamic relationships. In fact some have long studied some of the components in detail, such as water use for agriculture and use of crops for bioenergy. And yet despite the fact that these three resources are amongst the most important resources for human survival, the attention they have received as a single interdependent issue has been inadequate. – This is of interest to me in particular because my research is based around the water-energy nexus. Indeed, there is an aspect of food/agriculture in there too, which would be more prominent if the UK aimed to source all of its food from the UK … I digress.

Agriculture and a focus on land and soil should be central to both this year’s UNFCCC climate talks and the Earth Summit in June.

One of the themes of Rio+20 is ‘green growth’. The first and most obvious question will be ‘Can there be such a thing as green growth?’ and for me the answer is an emphatic ‘Yes’ - as long as there is a paradigm shift in the way that governments, the private sector and consumers think about resources.