Abstract
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasizes the importance of technology as a pillar for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Technology innovation promises benefits especially for the implementation of SDG 2 to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture. Contributing to current debates on SDG implementation, technology innovation, and cross-sectoral governance, we argue that technology innovation carries both the potential to contribute to global goal implementation and the risk of posing new governance challenges. Applying a food-water-technology nexus (FWTN) perspective, we conduct a case study on an emerging technology in urban agricultural production in Germany. The technology connects the wastewater treatment system and the agricultural production system and projects the transformation of a conventional sewage treatment plant into a ‘NEWtrient®-Center,’ which draws the essential resources for urban hydroponic plant cultivation from municipal wastewater. Building on qualitative and participatory research methods, the study provides deeper insights into the governance implications of FWTN issues stemming from the emerging technology. The analysis shows that this technology has the potential to facilitate SDG implementation, but simultaneously fuels new sector interlinkages between water and food and policy demands that substantiate the need for more integrated policymaking to ensure the smart use of technology to reach the SDGs.
Highlights
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasizes the importance of technology as a pillar for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; UN Interagency Task Team on Science, Technology and Innovation for the SDGs, 2018)
We address the following questions: How do food-water-technology nexus (FWTN) issues arising from the emerging technology relate to existing sectoral policies? How are these issues perceived by policy actors? What are the implications for governance regarding SDG implementation?
This study shows that the emerging SUSKULT technology has the potential to facilitate SDG implementation in Germany
Summary
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasizes the importance of technology as a pillar for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; UN Interagency Task Team on Science, Technology and Innovation for the SDGs, 2018). Technology innovation contributes to more effective global goal implementation, especially regarding the implementation of SDG 2 to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture (UN, 2015). According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (2017), agri-food technologies address the four dimensions of food security, namely, food availability, access, supply, and utilization. Irrigation technologies can, for instance, increase food availability, post-harvest and agri-processing technologies can improve food accessibility, bio-fortification can make. Innovative agri-food technologies promise more efficient use and reuse of natural resources (Pigford, Hickey, & Klerkx, 2018). The development of treatment technologies for the safe reuse of water in agriculture is a topical issue (Helmecke, Fries, & Schulte, 2020). To tap the potential of wastewater for agricultural production, research groups around the world are developing advanced wastewater treatment technologies, such as membrane bioreactors, membrane filtration, advanced oxidation, and ultraviolet disinfection (e.g., Lazarova, Asano, Bahri, & Anderson, 2013), as well as wastewater nutrient recovery technologies (e.g., Xie, Kyong Shon, Gray, & Elimelech, 2016)
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