Belmont Forum Collaborative Research Food-Water-Energy Nexus: Intelligent Urban Metabolic Systems for Green Cities of Tomorrow: an FWE Nexus-based Approach

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Many cities across the globe are facing difficult challenges managing their food, water and energy systems. The challenges stem from the fact that the issues of food, water and energy are often tightly connected with each other, not only locally but also globally. This is known as the Food-Water-Energy (FWE) nexus. An effective solution to a local water problem may cause new local problems with food or energy, or cause new water problems at the global level. On a local scale, it is difficult to anticipate whether solutions to one issue in the nexus are sustainable across food, water and energy systems, both at the local and the global scale. Innovative solutions that encompass the nexus are particularly important to enable cities to better manage their food, water and energy systems and understand the benefits and tradeoffs for different solutions. This award supports U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 29-country initiative through the joint Belmont Forum- Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe. The Sustainable Urbanization Global Initiative (SUGI)/Food-Water-Energy Nexus is a multilateral initiative designed to support research projects that bring together the fragmented research and expertise across the globe to find innovative solutions to the Food-Water-Energy Nexus challenge. The call seeks to develop more resilient, applied urban solutions to benefit a much wider range of stakeholders. The rapid urbanization of the world's population underscores the importance of this focus. International partners were invited to develop solutions for this challenge. The funds requested will be used to support U.S. participants to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., civil society, NGOs, and industry). Participants from other countries are funded through their national funding organizations. This project aims to identify the key factors of urban metabolism and their complex interactions from FWE Nexus perspective and to improve the cost-benefit for FWE consumption by optimizing food-water-energy reallocations. This project will identify critical FWE factors and define critical pathways of food-water-energy delivery to urban centers using advanced tools such as Artificial Intelligence, data mining, system dynamics modelling, agro-logistics and scenario analysis. The project seeks to understand the intertwined nature of food-water-energy in terms of their lifecycles, including production, processing, delivery, consumption, and disposal. The primary outcome will be the development of the intelligent urban metabolic systems for cities with challenges for green urban centers of tomorrow. The comprehensive solutions will provide stakeholders and decision makers with information that can be used to develop strategies to help sustain the inevitable trends of urbanization by effectively managing the food-water-energy nexus.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.