Water Energy Food: Vaccinating the Nexus

The demand for water, energy, and food (WEF) is increasing with a growing population and a larger proportion of people living high hydrocarbon dependent lifestyles. This is placing unprecedented pressure on global WEF resources, a situation that will be exacerbated with a shifting climate. To meet this demand and to ensure long-term WEF security there is a need for integrated, efficient, and sustainable resources management across the sectors. This is essential to enhance and maintain quality of life, and requires the overall system to adapt over appropriate timescales. Analogous to the human immune system, resilience can be enhanced by learning from shocks to the WEF nexus that lead to recovery and adaptation through improving the systems long-term memory. Through shocks to the system (vaccination in this analogy), society is provided the opportunity to improve resilience and sustainable management of the WEF sectors. In this context, shocks are represented by: 1) historic events, 2) controlled experimental manipulation, and 3) defined inputs to models. This project will identify the interconnections between Water Energy and Food (WEF) through the development of an integrated framework and will reveal the vulnerabilities in the system and the diverse connections between the three facets of the nexus. The project consists of three work packages (WPs) that cover a diverse array of scenarios for both aquatic and terrestrial systems integrated with a social science and economic modelling. In WP1 the response of aquatic food organisms to the shock of delivering the water and energy infrastructure plan will be investigated, culminating in the development of planning decision support tools based on integrated hydrodynamic and agent based models. WP2 will take an experimental, field based, and modelling approach to investigate the response of agriculture (focusing on soils and crops) to flooding under alternative climate change scenarios and based on historic data. The social aspects of shifting agricultural regimes, e.g. greater use of bioenergy crops in areas liable to flooding, will be investigated and quantified. WP3 will provide the social and economic modelling that will gather and analyse data obtained from the case studies and provide feedback to improve the models. Further, WP3 will investigate potential barriers to dissemination and uptake of the results within institutions and by end users that may benefit with the view to develop approaches that ameliorate for this. This work package is also dedicated to ensuring delivery of impact which will be enabled through close collaboration with several non-academic partners including industry. Delivery of the project will be managed by a team with diverse interdisciplinary expertise (including engineers, ecologists, agriculturalists, mathematicians, and social scientists) from the Universities of Southampton, Bath, London, Nottingham, Aberystwyth University, Loughborough University, University College London, HR Wallingford, and supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The team has a proven track record in project management, and strong links to industrial partners and other end users. The project will benefit industry, regulators, government, academia and the general public. The findings will be disseminated to: the academic community through publication of high impact research articles; the public through engagement via national and local media and internet and social networking platforms, and a structured Outreach programme involving schools and local science exhibitions; government through political outreach; and key stakeholders via relevant publications and participation in steering group workshops. The outputs will enable regulators to improve guidelines and to streamline the decision making processes for the benefit of industry and the nation as a whole.

The challenge of developing and maintaining sustainable Water-Energy-Food (WEF) systems is of national and international importance. The economic success of the UK over the next century will be influenced by todays strategic decisions on how to maintain WEF security and supply in the face of risks posed by ageing infrastructure, increased geopolitical insecurity, and climate change. The UK must successfully develop low carbon WEF sectors and protect biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. This project will have far-ranging and long-lasting impact through the benefit provided to industry, regulators, government, and the wider public. Primary beneficiaries are the energy, water, and food industry. WP1 will provide a water and energy infrastructure planning decision support tool that will enable the electricity generating and water supply sectors to better identify potential environmental impacts and shocks to aquatic provisioning ecosystem services (e.g. fisheries) of proposed infrastructures development. This will improve efficiency of planning and reduce costly delays in the consenting process (see RWE statement of support). Secondary industrial beneficiaries include consultants and other technical specialists tasked with conducting impact assessment and scenario planning for large-scale infrastructure projects. The regulator will benefit through enhanced quality and confidence of information on which decisions are made, thus improving the regulatory and consenting process (see Environment Agency statement of support). Government will benefit through greater capability of delivering the £466 Billion UK infrastructure plan essential to maintaining economic competitiveness and quality of life within the constraints of stringent environmental legislation (e.g. EU Water Framework Directive and Habitats Directive), while enhancing security of supply of water, energy, and food. WP2 will improve resilience of the UKs agriculture and bioenergy sectors in the face of climate change and increased intensity and frequency of shocks (e.g. flooding, droughts, changes in policy). Potential agriculture response to climate shocks, including a potential shift to bioenergy crops, will be evaluated to improve understanding of how resilience may be enhanced. This will benefit the agriculture and bioenergy sectors and related industries, such as environmental consultancies, through the development of integrated modelling approaches that couple empirical (laboratory and field) evidence with numerical modelling of hydrological processes. Policy makers and regulators (e.g. Defra) will benefit from the evidence obtained from the scenario-based modelling. The modelling framework will help the regulators and policy makers with evidence-based decision making. WP 3 will enhance the project's outreach to government and institutional stakeholders by integrating econometric analysis and social science modelling to inform economic and governance audiences. WP3 will integrate all project elements and their different (social and natural) scientific approaches. WP3 will provide a model grounded in empirical observation to assess how project stakeholders 'learn' from nexus shocks to enhance resilience. This will provide guidance on the appropriate type and magnitude of shock mitigation and response. This is of direct value to industry, regulators, local government and national offices (e.g. the Civil Contingencies Secretariat). Stakeholders involved in the project will benefit from policy briefs and recommendations. Overall, the general public will benefit from a securer low-carbon water, energy, and food supply in the face of predicted shortages, reduced costs of more efficient and sustainable WEF systems, a less degraded and more resilient environment, and future benefits generated through the investment in transdisciplinary nexus research and the associated spin-offs to other academic disciplines.