There was broad agreement among the participants of a side event on "The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus — A test drive for the Rio goals" which took place on 22nd March 2012 in New York that the Zero Draft of the "Rio +20" outcome document presents various opportunities for more explicitly incorporating the Nexus approach and perspective as a guiding principle for development towards a green economy
"There is need and opportunity for adding more Nexus into the Rio Declaration", as one participant put it. At the same time, participants recommended that the interdependencies between water, energy and food security be more clearly identified and articulated. And everybody agreed to the statement of Shenggen Fan, Director General of the International Food and Policy Research Institute IFPRI, that "People need to be put in the centre" of the discussions.
What future do we want for the interrelated sectors of water, energy and food? What are possible goals, targets and actions, indicators etc? Which open questions and challenges, such as data availability, persist? What are the main knowledge gaps? Those were the guiding questions for the lively discussions of this „test drive" for the Rio goals and discussions in the crucial areas of water, energy, and food security.
The Stakeholder Forum, which had been a partner of the Bonn2011 Nexus Conference, recommended that the focus needs to be more on people's access to water, energy and food, rather than only on economic growth. Georg Kell, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact, underscored the potential driving role of the corporate sector in implementing nexus approaches. He emphasized that they need to be reliable and recommended to focus on incentive structures which award front runners and could help to bring promising initiatives in the corporate sector to scale.
In her opening remarks, Elizabeth Thompson, Executive Coordinator for the UNCSD Rio + 20 Conference, highlighted the relevance of the nexus for both developing and developed countries in addressing social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Shenggen Fan stressed the importance of enhancing capacities to enable countries to develop tailor made approaches as well as the need for better mechanisms and tools to monitor and assess cross sectoral impacts.
It became clear during the discussion that although Sustainable Development Goals were generally considered as a valuable approach there are still substantial open questions concerning the conceptual framework — not the least with regard to the issue of monitoring and assessing their implementation.
The side event was held in the margins of the first round of informal-informal negotiations on the draft outcome document and just before the third intersessional meeting of the Preparatory Committee for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD or "Rio+20"). It was organised and hosted by the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United Nations, together with the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Rwanda, and the Federal Ministries for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) which had invited all permanent missions to the UN, delegations and major groups to the event.
"This was a successful test drive providing valuable input on the way to Rio+20," said Franz Marré from the BMZ. "And it will help us to focus on the right key challenges and prepare the forthcoming discussions and negotiations in Rio," concluded Thomas Stratenwerth from the BMU.