Understanding barriers to decision making in the UK energy-food-water nexus: The added value of interdisciplinary approaches
By Candice Howarth, I. Monasterolo. 2016
179 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The nexus represents a multi-dimensional means of scientific enquiry which seeks to describe the complex and non-linear interactions between water, energy, food, with the climate, and further understand wider implications for society. These resources are fundamental for human life but are negatively affected by shocks such as climate change and characterize some of the main challenges for global sustainable development. Given the multidimensional and complex nature of the nexus, a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge development through co-production is needed to timely and effectively inform the decision making processes to build societal resilience to these shocks going beyond the sectorality of current research practice. The paper presents findings from five themed workshops (shocks and hazards, infrastructure, local economy, governance and governments, finance and insurance) with 80 stakeholders from academia, government and industry in the UK to explore the impact of climate and weather shocks across the energy-food-water nexus and barriers to related responses. The research identified key stakeholders’ concerns, opportunities and barriers to better inform decision making centred on four themes: communication and collaboration, decision making processes, social and cultural dimensions, and the nature of responses to nexus shocks. We discuss implications of these barriers and how addressing these can better facilitate constructive dialogue and more efficient decision-making in response to nexus shocks.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Pollution, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b8802c9f96b52d0bacaec793f7f5d68bf29a058
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Citations in the corpus
- Identifying critical supply chains and final products: An input-output approach to exploring the energy-water-food nexus (2018, background): “Traditional sector and country-bound governance structures often leaves energy, water and food in competition [14] but adopting a multi-centric nexus lens means that we are able to consider a system as a whole and not as a subset of isolated resources, productive sectors and consumers [5,8].”
- Climate change and the water–energy–food nexus: insights from policy and practice in Tanzania (2018, background): “Howarth and Monasterolo (2016) highlight the need to understand the governance arrangements through which a nexus approach may be applied.”
- Anatomy of a buzzword: The emergence of ‘the water-energy-food nexus’ in UK natural resource debates (2016, background): “On-going efforts to institutionalise the nexus may provide welcome support for inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations (e.g. Howarth and Monasterolo, 2016) which improve the sustainability of food, energy and water provision, but spaces must be created for work which engages with the concept in…”
- Opportunities for knowledge co-production across the energy-food-water nexus: Making interdisciplinary approaches work for better climate decision making (2017, methodology): “…of this paper is to present and critically discuss additional findings from the five-themed workshops (see Step 3 above) building on findings from Howarth and Monasterolo (2016) and to explore how knowledge co-production can help identify opportunities for building more effective, sustainable,…”
- Water-energy-food nexus: Concepts, questions and methodologies (2018, unknown): “, 2016), energy-food157 water (Howarth and Monasterolo, 2016), water-energy-climate (Mu and Khan, 2009), 158 land use-climate change-energy (Dale et al.”