IGDC Research Seminar Series: Exploring sustainability, resilience, security and complexity within the water-energy-land-food nexus.

Event details

Seminar co-hosted with YCCSA

Separate considerations of water, energy, food and land use pressures and environmental constraints result in a waste of resources and incoherent planning worldwide. Current modelling of these pressures as an integrated nexus captures limited instances of a more complex feature: the distribution and trade networks formed by each of these nexus elements. Together these form a ‘multiplex’ that has not been studied previously as a whole. Moreover, the sustainability properties of these multiplexes and their implications for development are not understood. Using big data techniques to assimilate real-world water, energy, commodities’ trade and transport networks, and graph theory and complex systems science to analyse and model them, the seminar will explore how to (i) analyse their emerging complex properties, (ii) understand which of these properties lead to sustainability, (iii) test these properties and study their full potential in transformation simulation models to better understand and enhance sustainability, resilience and security, and (iv) formulate a new data-driven theoretical paradigm that studies sustainability from a systemic multiplex perspective. This project will lay the groundwork for new approaches to evaluating sustainability and development using the latest advances in big data and complex systems.