Belmont Forum Collaborative Research Food-Water-Energy Nexus: Waste Food-Energy-Water Urban Living Labs - mapping and reducing waste in the Food-Energy-Water Nexus

Many cities across the globe are facing difficult challenges managing their food, water and energy systems. The challenges stem from the fact that the issues of food, water and energy are often tightly connected with each other, not only locally but also globally. This is known as the Food-Water-Energy (FWE) nexus. An effective solution to a local water problem may cause new local problems with food or energy, or cause new water problems at the global level. On a local scale, it is difficult to anticipate whether solutions to one issue in the nexus are sustainable across food, water and energy systems, both at the local and the global scale. Innovative solutions that encompass the nexus are particularly important to enable cities to better manage their food, water and energy systems and understand the benefits and trade-offs for different solutions.

This award supports U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 29-country initiative through the joint Belmont Forum- Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe. The Sustainable Urbanization Global Initiative (SUGI)/Food-Water-Energy Nexus is a multilateral initiative designed to support research projects that bring together the fragmented research and expertise across the globe to find innovative solutions to the Food-Water-Energy Nexus challenge. The call seeks to develop more resilient, applied urban solutions to benefit a much wider range of stakeholders. The rapid urbanization of the world's population underscores the importance of this focus. International partners were invited to develop solutions for this challenge. The funds requested will be used to support U.S. participants to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., civil society, NGOs, and industry). Participants from other countries are funded through their national funding organizations.

This project aims to map and substantially reduce waste in the urban food-energy-water nexus in city-regions across three continents: Europe, Africa and South America. The project will establish four Urban Living Labs made up of key stakeholders who together will undertake participatory research to co-create and test newly integrated problem-solving methods and use economic valuation based on generated metrics to effectively re-balance and communicate the resulting social and environmental impacts.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.