The social aspects of shifting agricultural regimes, e.g. WP2 will take an experimental, field based, and modelling approach to investigate the response of agriculture (focusing on soils and crops) to flooding under alternative climate change scenarios and based on historic data. In WP1 the response of aquatic food organisms to the shock of delivering the water and energy infrastructure plan will be investigated, culminating in the development of planning decision support tools based on integrated hydrodynamic and agent based models. The project consists of three work packages (WPs) that cover a diverse array of scenarios for both aquatic and terrestrial systems integrated with a social science and economic modelling. This project will identify the interconnections between Water Energy and Food (WEF) through the development of an integrated framework and will reveal the vulnerabilities in the system and the diverse connections between the three facets of the nexus. In this context, shocks are represented by: 1) historic events, 2) controlled experimental manipulation, and 3) defined inputs to models.

Through shocks to the system (vaccination in this analogy), society is provided the opportunity to improve resilience and sustainable management of the WEF sectors. Analogous to the human immune system, resilience can be enhanced by learning from shocks to the WEF nexus that lead to recovery and adaptation through improving the systems long-term memory. This is essential to enhance and maintain quality of life, and requires the overall system to adapt over appropriate timescales. To meet this demand and to ensure long-term WEF security there is a need for integrated, efficient, and sustainable resources management across the sectors. This is placing unprecedented pressure on global WEF resources, a situation that will be exacerbated with a shifting climate. The demand for water, energy, and food (WEF) is increasing with a growing population and a larger proportion of people living high hydrocarbon dependent lifestyles. This project will be divided into three work packages It will investigate how nexus ‘shocks’, such as extreme climatic events that cause flooding, drought, energy shortages or unsustainable infrastructure development, may help inform the development of more environmentally sustainable and secure systems.

Vaccinating the Nexus is a prestigious EPSRC Programme Grant that will focus on improving the resilience of water, energy and food systems.

System shock 2 nexus