Publications /
Policy Brief

Back
The Water – Energy – Food Nexus: Who Owns it?
Authors
January 25, 2016

The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus has emerged over the last few years as an innovative and holistic platform for resource management and allocation. Unlike many other disciplines that make their way to the policy circle through academic debates, the nexus emerged from the global and policy business community as a platform to guide sustainability efforts. It is, with no doubt, that the nexus will find its way to the implementation of the sustainability development goals (SDGs), approved by the UN general assembly in September 2015. The nexus is also finding its way to the academic community, where a lot of scientific questions are awaiting answers: what are the data needs? What are appropriate modelling strategies? How will we scale (upscaling and downscaling)? And what is the appropriate scale for approaching the nexus? These are but a few of the technical challenges. With that in mind, critical questions need answers regarding the governance of the nexus, including ownership and appropriate governance structures. The global community is in urgent need of good, successful examples of how the nexus has helped reach water, energy and food security goals.

RELATED CONTENT

  • June 04, 2021
    The COVID crisis has demonstrated that health can be described as both (geo)political and economic capital, thus emphasizing the role it can play in power struggles at different scales. A ...
  • June 4, 2021
    The Native Indians in Guyana are among the country’s poorest populations. The RE NEW TT project wished to address one of the major problems the country’s Native Indian community is dealing with: the lack of access to energy. RE NEW TT installed a PV solar system at the sole indigenous p...
  • June 4, 2021
    Pour ce troisième épisode, Abdelhak Bassou évoque la menace terroriste au Sahel et les moyens de la combattre dans la région. En présentant le G5 Sahel et son rôle, notre spécialiste nous apporte une vision panoramique des enjeux sécuritaire dans la région. ...
  • Authors
    Nadia Makara
    June 3, 2021
    In an effort to spur economic growth, industrial parks were created to combine industrial activities with infrastructure, service, and commercial activities. These parks involve a collection of businesses, utilizing a combination of heavy and light manufacturing, that are located in a dedicated zone for industrial use to boost efficiency, minimize operational costs, and maximize output. Though industrial parks can contribute to economic growth and social development in a region, the ...
  • June 3, 2021
    For years, no one knew why dozens of battered wooden ghost boats, often with the corpses of North Korean fishermen, whose starved bodies were reduced to skeletons, routinely washed up on the Japanese coast, wrote Ian Urbina in an August 2020 report for Yale University’s 360 environment project. The explanation, he said, could be that “China is sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters, forcing out smaller North Korea boats and ...