BRIDGE - Building Resilience In a Dynamic Global Economy: Complexity across scales in the Food-Water-Energy Nexus

Completed

Not Energy Related
Other Cross-Cutting Technologies or Research(Environmental, social and economic impacts)

Basic and strategic applied research

SOCIAL SCIENCES (Economics and Econometrics)
SOCIAL SCIENCES (Politics and International Studies)
SOCIAL SCIENCES (Development Studies)
AREA STUDIES (American Studies and Anglophone Area Studies)

Systems Analysis related to energy R&D (Other Systems Analysis)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Policy and regulation)
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Technology acceptance)
Other (Energy technology information dissemination)

Professor J Vinuales
Land Economy
University of Cambridge

Standard

ESRC

01 October 2016

30 September 2019

36 months

£578,903

East of England

Newton

Professor J Vinuales, Land Economy, University of Cambridge

Dr NR Edwards, Faculty of Sci, Tech, Eng & Maths (STEM, Open University
Dr J Mercure, Land Economy, University of Cambridge

1- To develop a framework of analysis and policy engagement to effectively inform and support the policy cycle in Brazil to reach objectives of sustainable development in a context of global environmental and economic change.2- To engage with the policy process and cycle to determine the role of appropriate policy instruments and how they can be best implemented, to improve resilience of the food-water-energy nexus in Brazil to global environmental and economic change.3- To transfer analysis skills, technology and knowledge between the UK and Brazilian academic and policy communities to effectively inform and guide a continued sustainability transition.4- To jointly develop a new methodology to assess the cross-sectoral complexity and uncertainty involved in the food-water-energy nexus across scales, for Brazil in a context of global environmental and economic change.5- To jointly develop robust quantitative evidence and novel research tools and methods embedded in highly detailed new generation computational models, which will be made available to researchers in academia, industry, civil society and government, in both the UK and Brazil.6- To carry out successful demonstration of sustainability projects on the ground in Santa Catarina with key sectoral and regional policy institutions and networks whose activities impact on and have influence over the nexus challenges.

This proposal aims to develop a framework of analysis and policy engagement to improve the resilience of the Brazilian Food-Water-Energy (FWE) nexus to global environmental and economic change. It will combine established UK expertise and specifically developed, state-of-the-art analytical capacity in socio-economic and environmental modelling to build a robust environmental policy assessment methodology for the Brazilian FWE nexus in the context of global change. The modelling capacity, skills and knowledge will be transferred to relevant actors in Brazil to enable local academics to continue informing and engaging policymakers through a continued sustainability transition during and beyond the end of this project.Brazilian society faces significant uncertainty due to two significant global contextual factors. On one hand, global environmental change, due to global unsustainable resource use and greenhouse gas emissions, is highly likely to change weather patterns, which will affect detrimentally the land cover and biodiversity in Brazil, with severe impacts on agriculture. On the other hand, without appropriate policies in place, the Brazilian economy and environment, relying heavily on exports of natural resources for prosperity, can be vulnerable to global economic change, where changes in demand for commodities could lead to either environmental degradation and large scale land-use change, or decreased wealth and employment. Both types of changes are likely to impact and create intricate complexities in the Brazilian FWE nexus. These transformations and forces must be understood in order to minimise detrimental impacts to welfare and the environment in Brazil.Building on past experience and on a partnership with Brazilian academics established through our current EPSRC-CONFAP networking grant for research team building on the FWE nexus (EP/N002504/1), this project will produce a unique contribution to achieve these objectives by using a combination of state-of-the-art detailed multi-scale modelling of the coupled energy-economy-land-use-climate global system, linked to cutting-edge environmental policy and law expertise to effectively inform modelling activities of workable policy frameworks. The ultimate goal is to transfer both types of knowledge and capacity to relevant academic and non-academic actors in Brazil.Sustainability practices can be influenced by policy; however policy can have unexpected and unintended impacts. In order to effectively promote a sustainability transition, the policy process and cycle must be actively engaged with well-informed actors. This project will combine cutting-edge UK and Brazilian expertise in environmental policy and law with our state-of-the-art, detailed environmental policy modelling capacity to engage the Brazilian policy process in order to significantly improve policy-maker foresight and ultimately the resilience of Brazilian society to possible future global environmental and economic change through a sustainability transition. Finally, civil society and communities can be guided by sustainability projects that demonstrate best practice, exercises that can be scaled up and replicated. Building on previous successful experience of our Brazil-based team (the REGSA and JELARE projects), this project will also involve setting up small-scale sustainability demonstration and awareness-raising projects in order to show best-practice in each case and engage with the public. This will include a 'sustainable forest' project related to farming practices at the UNISUL university experimental farm, an 'energy forest' project related to the generation of sustainable forestry-related energy products, and a 'less hydro' simulation exercise to engage the public in understanding how to increase the resilience of the energy system to water scarcity

08/12/17