Food Energy Water Nexus // Breaking Silos
This mini symposium and panel discussion will explore the unique synergy between each of the three critical asset areas.
Around the world, cities are facing the impacts of growing populations, rapid urbanisation, climate change, resource scarcity, and limited environmental capacity to absorb pollution and waste. These global trends imply that we need to do more with less when it comes to resource management, and that the conventional production and consumption of food, energy and water needs to shift toward more sustainable practices. There have been significant attempts to realise this shift, of which hydroponics, renewables and water recycling are just a few examples. These sectoral endeavours, while highly valuable, often overlook the massive interlinkages between food, energy and water systems.
Dr Shirin Malekpour's presentation will explain a different perspective—the Nexus thinking—which tries to understand the interdependencies between the three systems, to maximise synergies and minimise trade-offs toward more responsible consumption and production. It will also introduce an interdisciplinary initiative at Monash University—the Food-Energy-Water Nexus.
The initiative aims to mobilise research across disciplines and in partnership with industries, businesses, governments and communities, identify key challenges and generate solutions for cross-sectoral impact. In the absence of scalable food-energy-water nexus solutions, the initiative tries to enable projects through which we can experiment with the interdependencies between the three systems and develop proof of concept for transformative solutions.
Where and when
Engineers Australia
Level 31
600 Bourke Street
Melbourne
Australia
11 Apr 2018