Sustainability // Developing Socio-Techno-Economic-Political (STEP) Solutions for Addressing Resource Nexus Hotspots
By Bassel Daher, Rabi H. Mohtar, Efstratios N. Pistikopoulos, Kent E. Portney, Ronald Kaiser and Walid Saad. This paper explores the multiple dimensions of water, energy, and food systems and their interaction with government, business and societal players, across different scales. It identifies critical questions and interlinkages across the resource systems and suggests an iterative 3-Filter STEP Framework for vetting solutions that address resource nexus hotspots.
Those questions address:
- Resources Interaction and Trade-offs
- Stakeholder Interactions and Trade-offs and
- Mobilising Nexus Interventions (Governance and Financing).
Daher et al. highlight the risks associated with planning and managing resource systems within silos. Solutions for such complex, interconnected, and uncertain problems cannot be only technical; they cannot account only for physical resource constraints or offer only socio-economic, technological, political, or financial interventions. Proposed scenarios must be multi-faceted, and vetted against different layers of constraints, where trade-offs can be evaluated.
The presented 3-Filter STEP Framework is intended to offer analysts, modellers, “nexus tool” developers, engineers, and social and policy researchers working towards addressing resource nexus hotspots a conceptual guideline.
While every expert focuses separately on vetting different aspects of proposed scenarios, this guideline suggested a structured stepwise approach and iterative feedback cycles, to guide their collaboration as they work towards arriving at STEP nexus solutions.
Daher et al. in this paper also emphasise the need for better quantification of the interactions between different governmental, business, and societal players to identify implementable solutions in given a landscape of interacting stakeholders with varying values, power, and preferences. Also, given that players and resources systems interact across scales, there is a further need for better understanding and quantifying those interactions, and ensuring solutions are implemented through policies that are coherent across different scales.
Proposing feasible, implementable, sustainable solutions requires truly inclusive transdisciplinary conceptualization, quantification, and assessment of current and projected resource hotspots.
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Published
2018
In
Sustainability 2018, 10 (2), 512; doi:10.3390/su10020512