Dr Bhaskar Vira from the University of Cambridge gave an update on the Nexus2020 project at the Nexus Network conference on 19 Nov 2015. The Nexus2020 project asked for responses to
What are the most important questions around business practice that, if answered, could help companies manage their dependencies and impacts upon food, energy, water and the environment?
Gathering questions
From March to July 2015, businesses, policy makers, academics and civil society were asked to submit the questions that they thought were most pressing, to be answered by research, to improve business management of the nexus.
Responses were collected following webinars, presentations, workshop sessions, newsletters, blogs and social media discussions. Over 700 questions were submitted to the Nexus2020 project by over 230 participants from a range of backgrounds.
Prioritising
A group of s
enior business practitioners and researchers were convened over two days to identify which of these 700 questions would make it into the top 40 questions that, if answered, would best help companies manage their food-energy-water-environment nexus dependencies and impacts.
This co-creation of research questions is vital to ensure that the issues businesses need to be explored are highlighted whilst also making sure they are answerable through research.
On the second day the group of participants distilled the list of research questions down to the top forty; a further exercise identified twenty ‘platinum’ research questions that were deemed most urgent to address by the participants.
The themes that emerged highlighted the need for interdisciplinary research and validated the value of incorporating nexus thinking into decision making.
Next steps
The top 40 research questions will be revealed in a forthcoming journal article. It is the role of multi-disciplinary panels of researchers and business practitioners to then devise the projects that will deliver the solutions to these pressing nexus issues.
Through collaboration between business, government and academia we can begin to answer these questions and address the most critical global challenges of today.
Download the Nexus2020 update as a pdf Nexus2020 Summary for NexusNetwork Conference.
Images and charts: with thanks to CISL Cambridge.
