ESRC Nexus Thinkpiece: Energy / food / water nexus in a changing climate: a critique of competing demands for UK land (original) (raw)
Background: Land is a valuable and fixed resource that provides a wide range of goods and services to society. The ability of land managers and the capacity of land to provide these services is becoming more difficult as both population and climate variability increase. In recent years competing and contradictory policy trajectories have emerged in the UK raising questions about how land can be managed to meet demands, now and in the future. Aims: To establish an agenda on resilient land-use to support integrated policy- and decision-making. By providing a synthesis and critique of existing policies relating to the nexus in the UK; exploring the implications for land-use in the UK within the context of key European and global trends; and identifying key questions for future management, policy and modelling. Policy challenges: The insularity and short-sightedness of policy is likely to jeopardise the resilience of the UK to climate change impacts, particularly against a backdrop of increasing and competing demands. 1. Fragmented policy and planning: policies and planning models poorly account for interconnections, synergies and trade-off's between nexus components. 2. Disjointed governance: energy, food and water are largely managed in isolation, and often in competition. Similar disconnection exists even within sectors. 3. Limited spatial scale: due to the lack of spatial granularity models and tools are inadequate to incorporate local capacity (e.g. finance, politics, and precedence) and goals (e.g. poverty alleviation, water scarcity/flood risk). Impacts of policies on other countries are rarely acknowledged raising concerns about equity. 4. Limited temporal scope: longer-term interactions and interdependencies are not considered and intergenerational trade-off's neglected. Resilience: At the nexus resilience is made even more complex and challenging due to differentiated scale and scope of components, and multiple different agendas. This is evident in debates on shale gas. Resilience in the form of energy security is used to justify exploration and extraction yet the long-term implications for water are uncertain; both in terms of demand, quality and potential consequences for local hydrological conditions.
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