Urban Living Labs: mapping and reducing waste in the food energy water nexus

This project aims to map and substantially reduce waste (resource inefficiencies) in the urban food-energy-water (FEW) nexus in city-regions across three continents: Europe, Africa and South America. We will establish four Urban Living Labs (ULL) made up of key stakeholders who together will undertake participatory research to: a) map resource flows; b) identify critical dysfunctional linear pathways; c) agree the response most appropriate to the local context (e.g. policy intervention, technology diffusion); d) model the market and non-market economic valuenewly integrated problem-solving methods appropriate to each context. We will use micro and macro-economic valuation based on generat of each intervention; and e) engage with decision-makers to close each loop. We will co-create and test ed metrics to effectively re-balance and communicate the resulting socio-environmental impacts. Knowledge brokerage by peer-to-peer exchange will enable the identification of commonalities across the ULLs and drive the application of our outputs elsewhere in the world. We include four PhDs - two will be shared supervision PhD projects (UK-South Africa) - and one post-graduate who will self-manage, under supervision, an international knowledge exchange forum. Ultimately, we will contribute policy decision support models for economically viable waste reduction and rethinking of waste as a resource in the FEW nexus perspective as well as contribute to establish entrepreneurship networks in each ULL to continue working after the formal end of the project. (AU)