Research paper on tracing the water-energy-food nexus

Hayley Leck, Declan Conway and Judith Rees from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE along with Michael Bradshaw from Warwick Business School, have published a paper on ‘Tracing the Water–Energy–Food Nexus: Description, Theory and Practice‘, in the Journal Geography Compass (Volume 9, Issue 8, pages 445–460, August 2015).

The paper

• provides an overview of recent initiatives around the nexus.
• advocates an ‘analytical eclecticism’ approach to guide nexus research across disciplinary boundaries; to ‘encourage greater dialogue across research traditions through considering and utilising, rather than replacing or displacing, critical research efforts by adherents of specific traditions and theoretical framings’.
• examines the practical barriers to nexus analyses, such as limited data & modelling capacity and highly complex governance systems.
• how to move from nexus ‘rhetoric and ambition’ to a ‘detailed, research-based evidence on how to implement nexus research and deliver real-world solutions’.

The authors say

…the ambitious aims of the nexus—the desire to capture multiple interdependencies across three major sectors, across disciplines and across scales—could become its downfall. However, greater recognition of interdependencies across state and non-state actors, more sophisticated modelling systems to assess and quantify WEF linkages and the sheer scale of WEF resource use globally, could create enough momentum to overcome historical barriers and establish nexus approaches as part of a wider repertoire of responses to global environmental change.

Read the full paper

You can download the paper ‘Tracing the Water–Energy–Food Nexus: Description, Theory and Practice‘, in the Journal Geography Compass, Volume 9, Issue 8, pages 445–460, August 2015. (Note, you may not be able to see the link if you/ your organisation does not subscribe to the journal).

Contact the authors

For more information contact Hayley Leck, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, King’s College London. Hayley’s research focuses on the governance of climate adaptation, urban resilience and the social and policy elements of urban disaster risk. She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals and societies in diverse contexts perceive and respond to environmental change and disasters and the institutional, social and other factors that influence capacities for adaptation and transformation at multiple scales.