October 1, 2019
Bassel Daher, PhD
Research Associate, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering; Texas A&M Energy Institute
Research Fellow, Institute for Science Technology & Public Policy, Bush School of Government & Public Service, Texas A&M University
The grand challenges our world faces today - including growing water, energy, and food insecurities - are complex and tightly interconnected. Addressing them requires working across disciplines to develop innovative and multifaceted solutions that respond to their social, economic, technological, and policy dimensions. These solutions also need to be co-created by engaging with a diverse array of stakeholders who govern, consume, and manage the supply chains of the resource systems.
Water, Energy, and Food Sustainable Development Goals
Currently, 785 million people lack access to basic drinking water services; 1.1 billion lack access to energy; about 815 million are critically undernourished (FAO, 2017; Stephan et al, 2018). Global population is projected to reach 8.6 billion by 2030, combined with alarms about exceeding an additional 1.5oC warming globally and the implications for resource securities, the projected demand for increased water (+55%), energy (+80%), and food (+60%) by 2050 represents considerable stress to our resource systems, threatening their sustainability.
In September 2015, world leaders committed to seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), part of the 2030 sustainable development agenda. Each Goal has a list of quantifiable targets to be achieved in the coming 15 year term.
Interconnected water, energy, and food goals and interacting governmental, business and civil society organizations (Daher et al., 2018)
As nations work to achieve this agenda, risks arise of potential competition between specific targets that could have unintended consequences, further challenging progress toward the Goals. One strategy directly affects the others. While it is important that we work toward achieving all 17 Goals, it is equally important to understand their levels of interconnectedness and potential competition, for example, the three highly interconnected Water, Energy, and Food Goals (2, 6, and 7).
Existing barriers and ways to overcome them
Given the growing pressures facing our interdependent resource systems today, we can no longer afford to plan within silos. We must build on lessons learned across case studies globally and update our toolkits and approaches, developing plans and policies consistent with our understanding of the level of interdependence among the resource challenges. Creating the necessary environments to allow 1) development of needed interdisciplinary research, 2) cross-sectoral cooperation, and 3) appropriate levels of engagement and exchanges of information between researchers and cross-sectoral stakeholders, can help accomplish this goal. Investment in three types of bridges is needed:
- BRIDGES between researchers across disciplines: the interconnected challenges are too complex for one discipline to address. We need investments that incentivize the creation of interdisciplinary teams of researchers focused on addressing grand challenges. There is great potential in exploring the interface between the natural and the social sciences.
- BRIDGES between governmental, business, and civil society’s cross-sectoral stakeholders: the need for coordination mechanisms (legal, institutional, other) between sectors to ensure coherence in planning and management. Capacity building is important, but not sufficient, unless accompanied with reform of institutional mandates incentivizing greater, more integrative planning. Despite the cross-sectoral competition over resources, only modest communication exists between the organizations governing them. This is often due to the lack of cross-institutional mechanisms to promote higher levels of communication and sufficient allocation of funds and time towards that goal. Unless the mandates of these organizations include a greater commitment to communication and cooperation, and appropriately allocated resources toward these goals, no substantial change can happen.
- BRIDGES between researchers and stakeholders: help ensure convergence between interdisciplinary research groups working on understanding and quantifying the interconnections and trade-offs across resource systems, and cross-sectoral actors representing public, private, societal organizations with differing goals, value systems, and decision-making powers. There is unlocked potential and improvements to be made in communicating complexity.
In a recent TEDx Talk, I shared three lessons learned from working on a community development project in Beirut, which had its share of interconnected complex challenges. These lessons, learned nearly a decade ago, remain true today:
- Technical/engineering know-how is important, but insufficient to address the complexity of the interconnected challenges our societies face today. We must ensure that the solutions developed include an understanding of the relevant social, economic, and political constraints.
- Early engagement of the community, stakeholders, is important. This community must have ownership of locally contextualized solutions requiring implementation and should be an integral part of unpacking the complex challenges and co-creating solutions to address them.
- The importance of communicating technical know-how to those making decisions. Communication and dissemination should not be an afterthought: it is as critical, and needs a similar investment of time and effort, as the process of developing the solutions themselves.
What kind of bridges are YOU interested in building? How will YOU choose to contribute?
