05 Mar 2014
00:00
Side Event at the Nexus Conference // Water, Energy, and Food Nexus Tool: Strengthening the Interface between Science and Policy Communities
Convened by Texas A&M University and Qatar National Food Security Program. With global population growing over 7 billion, accompanied by escalating economic crises, mismanagement of natural resources, climatic changes and uncertainties, and growing poverty and hunger, the world is living in a critical period defined by global challenges. These challenges are linked with social, economic, and political risks and unrest that present and future generations face.
Our global community is facing unprecedented risks and challenges that are directly linked to the way we currently understand and manage our resources. Providing sustainable solutions to overcome present challenges poses the need to study the existent interlinkages between these resources.
The nature of the intimate relation between water, energy, and food forces a paradigm shift in the management approach; moving from silos to more integrative approaches.
Our group has developed a new scenario-based framework and set of methodologies that: define the interconnections between water, energy and food provides explicit quantifications for interconnections according to defined methodology.
Based on the proposed framework, we developed a tool aimed at identifying sustainable resource management strategies governed by the water-energy-food nexus.
The tool allows the user to CREATE multiple scenarios composed of different variations of food, water, energy, and international trade portfolios. The user is able to VISUALIZE the amount of resources consumed by different proposed scenarios. The user would then DECIDE the relative importance of reducing each of the resource requirements in order to arrive to a scenario that is most favorable for adoption based on incorporated "sustainability index" criteria.
Goal of proposed session is to introduce this integrative framework and tool to conference participants. It will also be a chance to give an overview of our ongoing projects after which we could identify synergies with interested participants.