24 janv. 2017
Policy Brief // Sustainability in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Bridging Science and Policy Making
By Bassel Daher. Policy decisions made within one sector are felt across all others connected to it. A clear understanding of how future policy decisions will impact all three of the interconnected WEF sectors is vital. To reach this understanding, we need to quantify the linkages between these sectors, underpinned by a thorough understanding of how these linkages vary between regions and across time.
Key Policy Messages
- Operationalise: The need for a nexus approach to managing water, food and energy is widely recognized as pressures mount on these highly interconnected resources in ways that are hard to anticipate. The problem is how to make that nexus operational in a world of disciplinary silos and widespread mismanagement of resources.
- Glocalise: The WEF nexus calls for holistic and integrated approaches that simultaneously maintain relevance to local stakeholders, stressors, and scales.
- Integrate: To reduce our response time to challenges and facilitate the rapid implementation of research driven policy, we must address the fragmentation between scientific and policy communities, across disciplines and within organizations.
- Analyse: Effective dialogue among stakeholders concerning the trade-offs and opportunity costs of resource allocation decisions requires the adoption of scenario assessment and communication tools that quantify interconnections between resource systems.