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What has GoNEXUS been reading over the winter?

The winter break is often the perfect time to sit by the fire, slow down and feed your brain with interesting reads. GoNEXUS consortium members share with you their best discoveries related to the water, energy, food nexus and their work in the project. Check them out below and happy reading!

Scott Sinclair, a senior researcher at the Chair of Hydrology and Water Resources Management, ETH Zurich, has recently been reading the book “Modern Fortran: Building efficient parallel applications“.

His role in GoNEXUS is largely related to high-resolution Hydrological modelling for the Zambezi and Lake Como case studies. The book is interesting for his work because the TOPKAPI-ETH hydrological model used in the project is a complex physically based distributed model coded in modern Fortran. Scott is responsible for supporting many uses of the model both within, and external to the GoNEXUS project, and has an interest in using open-source software tools to support research in the WEFE nexus domain.

Annika Kramer works at the Berlin-based think tank Adelphi and, within GoNEXUS, is responsible for leading two work packages, WP6 (the GoNexus Dialogues) and WP8 (Communication), while being engaged in a few others. She recently read an inspiring article in Earth’s Future called “Tradeoffs and Synergies Across Global Climate Change Adaptations in the Food-Energy-Water Nexus“.

Starting off from the problem that Food-energy-water (FEW) systems are increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards and climate change risks, the journal article analyzes a global data set of documented climate change adaptations that are relevant to the social and environmental vulnerabilities of the FEW nexus. It finds that adaptations targeting food security are more robustly documented than adaptations concerning water and energy security, especially in Africa and Asia. Interestingly, the results also suggest that adopting a nexus approach to future FEW-related adaptations can have profound benefits in the management of scarce resources and with financial constraints under a warming climate.”