08 Oct 2013
Call for Papers // Critical Thinking on the "New Security Convergence" in Energy, Food, Climate and Water: Is the Nexus Secure... and for Whom?
Water Alternatives, an interdisciplinary journal on water, politics and development, will publish a special issue on Critical Thinking On the 'New Security Convergence' in Energy, Food, Climate and Water.
The editors invite papers both from academics and practitioners that could be published as part of this special issue. Abstracts must be submitted by 15 Dec 2013.
The concept of the "nexus" has gained salience over time, through the Bonn Conference in 2011, the Sixth World Water Forum in Marseilles, France and the Rio +20 negotiations in 2012, making it the new vocabulary to define sustainable development (Gies, 2012). The idea started with the World Economic Forum in 2008 and the different resource 'crises' in terms of food and energy. In a nutshell, nexus underpins the acute pressure on world's natural resources generated through a combination of factors as climate change and the human response to climate change, global demographic trends of burgeoning population size and increased consumption levels. The 'nexus' debate is primarily a debate about natural resource scarcity.
The nexus approach highlights the interdependence of water, energy and food security and the natural resources that underpin that security - such as soil, land, and nutrient cycles. The German government was promoting the concept at Bonn then Rio based on the belief that a better understanding of the interdependence of water, energy and climate policy will provide an informed and transparent framework for determining trade-offs and synergies that meet demand without compromising sustainability.
Water security remains central to the concept of nexus; in short food and energy security can only be achieved through water security. Climate change is a string amplifier but not the primary driver for change (Bogardi, 2012). The concept has led to the proliferation of high-level workshops, seminars and conferences, as well as new policies and perspective papers from the Global Water Partnership, World Economic Forum and the German Government (to name a few) that make the nexus and water security out to be the new 'development imperative'.
The impact of this new "WEF nexus" concept is uncertain but the links between water, energy and climate create a renewed interest for project around hydropower and storage. Lall (World Economic Forum, 2011) argues that in the backdrop of climate change and climate variability, the key question that global society faces is "how should our water best be stored and which stores should be used to minimize risks due to long term climate variability and change?" Storage is argued to guarantee reliability in water supply, which in turn means food security, electricity generation and industrial growth.
Water Alternatives will publish a special issue on Critical Thinking On the "New Security Convergence" in Energy, Food, Climate and Water. We invite papers both from academics and practitioners that could be published as part of this special issue. Specifically, the papers should seek to address one or several of the following points:
-Who are the key actors driving the "nexus", how and why, and what intended and unintended purposes does it serve?
-What dominant narratives are driving energy, climate and water security at scales ranging from the local to the global? Is there a growing convergence between these various securities, and the way that they are framed? Which types of risk and uncertainties are formally recognised, which remain unrecognised — how and why?
-What are the implications of insights from the concept of "dynamic sustainabilities" for how notions of food, water and energy securities are framed and applied, given the implicit connotation of stability within the concept of security? With what consequences?
-Is the nexus replacing or complementing the IWRM paradigm?
-What are the links between the nexus thinking and the green economy?
-Is the nexus the new buzzword? What is new about nexus that did not exist in common knowledge?