What is the nexus?
What is the Nexus?
The ESRC defines ‘the nexus’ as a way of thinking about the interdependencies, tensions and trade-offs between food, water and energy security, in the wider context of environmental change. But there are many nexuses: in addition to food, energy, water and the environment, we need to understand interactions across other systems, including land, health and cities. Interdependencies can also be understood as a range of geographical, political and temporal scales. Some are inherently global, such as climate change. Others, such as food security, cut across scales, or are highly localised, such as urban air pollution.
The Nexus Network embraced plurality, deliberately avoiding a narrow operational definition of the nexus. The concept, in all its fuzziness, has functioned as a helpful convening mechanism for diverse disciplinary and sectoral perspectives.