The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to end poverty, fight inequalities and tackle climate change, while ensuring the inclusion and protection of societies most vulnerable groups. The SDGs are organized in 169 targets whose rate of achievement should be monitored by indicators developed by the “Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators”. The monitoring of target achievement represents a large challenge for the national statistical offices, due to lack of data, insufficient definitions, and unforeseen trade-offs between sectors. Additionally, the ‘Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus’ approach is becoming increasingly popular among practitioners and scholars for addressing global challenges related to sustainable development.
However, very few studies on the Nexus are based on comprehensive quantitative assessment of resources integrating human and environmental dimensions with a socio-ecosystem based approach. This is, however, necessary since there is a genera agreement that sector oriented interventions may trigger Nexus trade-offs. For example, achieving food security can have direct impacts on water resources and energy needs. The group aims to explore how global hydrology, vegetation, land surface , land use, and agent-based models can help monitor progress towards targets defined by the SDGs and project progress by simulating the proposed indicators over the next 15 years. We will build a transdisciplinary collaborative environment following the path from modelling of biophysical variables to monitoring of societal goals, to policy impact.
To achieve these objectives, our group will explore the synergies and trade-offs between multiple dimensions of space and time, and between water, energy, and agricultural sectors.. This multi-scale approach will be adopted to propose preferable solutions to approach global challenges for achieving sustainability, while trying to integrate a nexus approach from river basin up to country and global scales. Additionally, we will characterize how uncertainty is perceived by stakeholders and policy makers, how trust in models influences implementation and how researchers can best communicate and disseminate their methodologies, results, and broader impacts to policy relevant stakeholders.
The group members cover a broad spectrum of competences (from hydrologic modelling, to climate sciences, economics, governance, decision science, psychology) and have in common an active involvement in sustainability science, transdisciplinary contributions to novel approaches and high-level publications in the field. The past and ongoing activities of the members include vegetation and hydrology modelling, perception of uncertainty, integrated assessment, and participatory institutional analysis of the W-E-F Nexus at different scales ranging from local to global. The team is composed of distinguished senior researchers, but also young researchers who are active in publication. Although many members of our group have collaborated on previous work, our group has been established ad-hoc for the specific purposes of this Core Group for the Sustainable Water Future Programme. The trans-disciplinary character of the group is well grounded in disciplinary competences that were selected with the specific aim of supporting the transformation to water sustainability at the interface between science and policy making.
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