Abstract
As nations develop policies for low-carbon transitions, conflicts with existing policies and planning tools are leading to competing demands for land and other resources. This raises fundamental questions over how multiple demands can best be managed. Taking the UK as an empirical example, this paper critiques current policies and practices to explore the interdependencies at the water-energy-food nexus. It considers how current land uses and related policies affect the UK’s resilience to climate change, setting out an agenda for research and practice relevant to stakeholders in land-use management, policy and modelling. Despite recent progress in recognising such nexus challenges, most UK land-related policies and associated science continue to be compartmentalised by both scale and sector and seldom acknowledge nexus interconnections. On a temporal level, the absence of an over-arching strategy leaves inter-generational trade-offs poorly considered. Given the system lock-in and the lengthy policy-making process, it is essential to develop alternative ways of providing dynamic, flexible, practical and scientifically robust decision support for policy-makers. A range of ecosystem services need to be valued and integrated into a resilient land-use strategy, including the introduction of non-monetary, physical-unit constraints on the use of particular services.
Highlights
Water, energy and food are inextricably linked, and a failure to recognise the repercussions of actions and planning decisions in one area has often led to substantial consequences for another
The water-energy-food nexus was introduced at Bonn 2011, a precursor to Rio 2012, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, relevant discussions started at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2008 (World Economic Forum, 2011)
This paper has considered policies aimed at the sectors of water, energy and food production, covering the policy scope, spatial and temporal aspects of the nexus in relation to competing land uses
Summary
Energy and food are inextricably linked, and a failure to recognise the repercussions of actions and planning decisions in one area has often led to substantial consequences for another. The current drive towards bioenergy as part of climate change mitigation strategies has significant implications for the availability of land and water with subsequent ramifications for food prices and global trade (Pimentel et al, 2008; Popp et al, 2014) Nexus thinking in this context represents a sustained effort to recognise the interconnections between these resources; to understand their interdependencies, synergies and trade-offs and to draw attention to competing demands and disparate visions (Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), 2011). The production of bioenergy has implications for water management, and for the availability of land for food production (Knox et al, 2013; Pimentel et al, 2008; Popp et al, 2014) These examples illustrate the interdependent nature of resilience at the nexus, raising the fundamental questions of whether and how policy might better enable systemic resilience to resource constraints and a changing climate. Any new approaches must go beyond the usual monitoring and modelling to examine the interactions between the nexus components
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