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Mini-blog: Adrian’s takeaways from EGU

Adrián González-Rosell from UPM recently went to EGU 2023. When asked to summarise his experience in a few words, he produced the following mini-blog for you to read below.

In today’s world, water, energy, and food security, and conservation of ecosystems (WEFE nexus security) is one of the most pressing challenges we face. Our current systems of food production, energy use, and water management often operate in silos, resulting in a lack of coordination and high trade-offs across sectors. Furthermore, this lack of coordination is detrimental to the conservation of ecosystems. To address this, it is necessary to design policies or solutions capable of addressing cross-sectoral challenges.

As part of the GoNEXUS project, the UPM team has developed a novel methodological framework called GoNEXUS SEF. The aim of this framework is to co-design and evaluate nexus solutions to improve the governance of the WEFE nexus. It is a participatory process that integrates qualitative and quantitative methods and has five main phases: identifying nexus solutions, nexus dialogues, model toolbox, nexus evidence, and nexus-coherence assessment. Through the application of this framework, we can identify key aspects of the complex cross-sectoral system and allow the evaluation and coordination of multiple policies at the same time, helping to achieve nexus-cohesive policymaking.

The GoNEXUS SEF was presented by the UPM team at the recent EGU 2023 congress and the research on its development and applicability has been published in Springer’s Sustainability Science journal (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01324-1). Overall, this novel participatory framework shows great promise in addressing sustainability challenges and promoting the transition toward a more sustainable future. It is highly adaptable and can be applied to various case studies with different spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, it will serve as the reference framework for evaluating the different case studies within the project.