SE4All Workshop on Water-Energy-Food Nexus

On 22 February 2016 the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) Technical Workshop on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus will take place at the Embassy of Hungary in Vienna, Austria

The workshop will bring together about 20-30 technical experts from international development organizations, as well as representatives from the private and public sectors, civil society and academia.

Background:

In September 2015, world leaders formally adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets which are aimed at stimulating action over the next 15 years in areas of critical importance for a more equitable and sustainable world. The strong linkages between the SDGs underlines the notion that progress on each goal will be critical for progress on others, with increasing understanding for the implementation of the SDGs through an integrated framework that demands close collaboration at all levels of governance. As a result, the water-energy-food nexus has emerged as a crucial policy and governance approach for integrated planning and implementation of the SDGs.

Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All), a global initiative led by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon to achieve universal energy access, improve energy efficiency, and increase the use of renewable energy, proposed a global partnership programme on capacity development to facilitate inter-sector coordination through technical assistance and advisory services. A key aspect of that proposal is the Technical Assistance Programme to Strengthen Inter-sector Coordination (TAPSIC). The objective of TAPSIC is to operationalize the nexus approach by strengthening human and institutional capacity to facilitate inter-sector co-ordination.

Purpose of the workshop:

The purpose of the workshop is to stimulate dialogue on the centrality of the energy agenda and its cross-cutting implications for the SDGs and explore opportunities to operationalize the water-energy-food nexus. The output of the workshop will be useful for the SE4All strategy and business plan for 2016 – the year which marks the beginning of implementation of the SDGs and the Paris Agreement.

The workshop will focus on:

• Emerging opportunities – exploring ways to develop a concrete framework to anchor opportunities within the SE4All High Impact Opportunities (HIOs)
• Means of implementation (action agenda) – realities, challenges, response strategies;
• Mobilizing resources – exploring the possibility of a call for funding;
• Strengthening partnerships – the private sector, civil society and the public sector.

The Water-Energy-Food Nexus research under the Water Future and Solutions Initiative

The the focus of IIASA´s water program and particularly its core activity the Water Future and Solutions Initiative (WFaS) in recent years has been to build networks and capacity, build cross‐cutting scenarios, and identify hotspots and challenges of water, food and energy security from those scenarios.

In addition, recent activities have also spanned a number of case studies to perform regional scenario analyses and develop approaches for assuring cross‐scale consistency, to develop methods for assessing options put forward as solutions, to investigate and assess specific synergies and tradeoffs of these options across the nexus, and to build tools for communicating results with stakeholders. These local findings significantly improved the understanding of local water-related nexus issues on food, energy, trans-boundary water management and ecosystem services.

Current research proposals are focused on nexus tradeoffs and the identification of joint solutions working across sectors and scales.

Via Paul T. Yillia, IIASA works closely together with SE4All enabling a strengthening of up-to-date nexus efforts continuously.

For more information on the workshop view the program and SE4All website.

Last edited: 10 July 2018