Call: Nexus Management Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems 2022 (CSA)

Challenge

Increasing climate warming and populations are projected to place additional pressure on the availability of food, energy and water in the Mediterranean Region. Implications for the future of ecosystems and biodiversity are equally daunting, impacting the supply of ecosystem services and goods to people. Improving countries’ preparedness to tackle the socio-economic vulnerability and resilience of the Water, Energy, Food, Ecosystems (WEFE) sectors will require greater alignment between agricultural, energy and nature management options and policies. Moving away from sectoral silos towards an enhanced cross-sectoral collaboration in the deployment of WEFE Nexus solutions is essential to alleviate the situation and pave the way for a green economy and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. This approach needs a robust coordination mechanism where key stakeholders can better identify and prioritize solutions together, benefitting from an overall Nexus perspective.

Gathering scientists, practitioners, policymakers, investors, and other stakeholders in a Mediterranean WEFE Nexus Community of Practice (NCoP) was recognized during the 2021 WEFE Nexus Science Advances Conference as a way to link the supply of evidence to its demand. An initiative for a Community of Practice would provide stakeholders with convincing evidence of the benefits of the WEFE Nexus approach in the region as a basis for decision-making, decreasing the resistance to the practical deployment of a cross-sectoral Nexus approach in the management of natural resources in the Mediterranean Region.

Scope

Proposals are expected to contribute to the establishment of a Mediterranean WEFE Nexus Community of Practice (NCoP), which is envisaged to:

• Promote the identification and communication of WEFE Nexus best practices and technical solutions
• Act as an effective and sustainable forum/platform to attract and stimulate collaboration and knowledge sharing across stakeholders
• Interface science, policy and practice around WEFE Nexus demonstration cases as socio-innovation experiments in the Mediterranean Region.

The NCoP should be built around a network of existing WEFE Nexus demonstration cases[1] to disclose and make available explicit and tacit knowledge spread across the Mediterranean Region. Demonstration cases will be a distinctive feature of the NCoP, which will be more than a meeting place, but a space for learning together by directly channelling hands-on experience on applying a Nexus approach directly from demonstration cases to the table of decision-makers. Proposals are not expected to develop new demonstration cases but to take stock of the state of play in research and practice by connecting with existing relevant projects and networks.

The NCoP should involve practitioners, scientists, national-level programme teams as well as members from inter-governmental bodies, non-government (NGOs) and civil society (CSOs) organizations, who will exchange data and best practices from hands-on demonstration actions providing evidence of the economic and socio-ecological benefits of the WEFE Nexus approach. By raising awareness among stakeholders, the CSA will help increase the implementation of the outcomes and support further uptake of the NCoP.

In collaboration with selected organisations, PRIMA-IS will steer the overall activities of the NCoP Community of Practice. In cooperation with PRIMA, the CSA will be responsible for building and engaging intensely in the Community by promoting discussion and projects. The CSA will assist PRIMA in identifying priority areas and types of activities that should be taken to ensure a self-sustainable Community of Practice. The details of these coordination activities will be defined with PRIMA during the grant preparation phase. 

Proposals should set out a plan on how to:

• Run a Mediterranean WEFE Nexus community of practitioners, innovators and local implementing authorities to promote the development, replication and upscaling of WEFE Nexus solutions at regional scale.
• Identify, attract and federate demonstration cases beyond the partnership of the consortium in order to ensure as much as possible the regional coverage of the Community of Practice with a critical mass of actors.
• Analyse the respective roles of scientists, local authorities, communities, and potential investors in developing governance models in the demonstration cases.
• Propose NCoP engagement measures to mobilize a diversity of institutional, research and local actors to learn from and support each other in providing solutions to overcome sectoral fragmentation in decision-making.
• Analyse and develop recommendations on how to promote the adoption of Nexus best practices accounting for regional specificities.
• Develop a mechanism for capacity building and Nexus knowledge transfer, including communication, outreach, stakeholder events and awareness-rising campaigns in Mediterranean countries.
• Instruments such as a NCoP Knowledge Hub should be developed to gather, evaluate and synthesise research outcomes for the Mediterranean Region, facilitate the exchange of information and data and provide support and advice to the NCoP members.

Expected impacts

In the long term

– To foster the shift from sectoral Water, Ecosystems, Food and Energy management towards an integrated resource-use approach in the Mediterranean Region by sharing knowledge on the Nexus approach

– To enable a long-lasting cooperation within and between demonstration areas for the development of scientifically validated socio-innovative adaptation and mitigation measures 

In the short term

– To promote/support the deployment of regional demonstration cases as laboratories for scale-up and policy design

– To contribute to the development, testing, dissemination and replication WEFE Nexus solutions in the Mediterranean Region and beyond 

Key Performance Indicators

• Degree of integration between water-related policies, such as environmental, climate, agriculture and energy policies
• Number of stakeholders involved in the NCoP
• Number of Nexus demonstration cases actively engaged in the NCoP

Links with EU Policies, HE Mission’s and partnerships

The proposal should indicate linkages to relevant EU policies and objectives in the context of the European Green Deal and relevant Horizon Europe Missions and Partnerships

Links with SDGs

Indicate links with the relevant SDG target.

[1] A WEFE Nexus demonstration case is an area where innovative technologies, processes, management and governance models, including decision support system tools, digital solutions, data infrastructure, demonstrating the economic, social, environmental benefits of a WEFE Nexus approach are implemented and validated