BRIDGE - Building Resilience In a Dynamic Global Economy: Complexity across scales in the Food-Water-Energy Nexus

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This proposal aims to develop a framework of analysis and policy engagement to improve the resilience of the Brazilian Food-Water-Energy (FWE) nexus to global environmental and economic change. It will combine established UK expertise and specifically developed, state-of-the-art analytical capacity in socio-economic and environmental modelling to build a robust environmental policy assessment methodology for the Brazilian FWE nexus in the context of global change. The modelling capacity, skills and knowledge will be transferred to relevant actors in Brazil to enable local academics to continue informing and engaging policymakers through a continued sustainability transition during and beyond the end of this project.Brazilian society faces significant uncertainty due to two significant global contextual factors. On one hand, global environmental change, due to global unsustainable resource use and greenhouse gas emissions, is highly likely to change weather patterns, which will affect detrimentally the land cover and biodiversity in Brazil, with severe impacts on agriculture. On the other hand, without appropriate policies in place, the Brazilian economy and environment, relying heavily on exports of natural resources for prosperity, can be vulnerable to global economic change, where changes in demand for commodities could lead to either environmental degradation and large scale land-use change, or decreased wealth and employment. Both types of changes are likely to impact and create intricate complexities in the Brazilian FWE nexus. These transformations and forces must be understood in order to minimise detrimental impacts to welfare and the environment in Brazil. Building on past experience and on a partnership with Brazilian academics established through our current EPSRC-CONFAP networking grant for research team building on the FWE nexus (EP/N002504/1), this project will produce a unique contribution to achieve these objectives by using a combination of state-of-the-art detailed multi-scale modelling of the coupled energy-economy-land-use-climate global system, linked to cutting-edge environmental policy and law expertise to effectively inform modelling activities of workable policy frameworks. The ultimate goal is to transfer both types of knowledge and capacity to relevant academic and non-academic actors in Brazil.Sustainability practices can be influenced by policy; however policy can have unexpected and unintended impacts. In order to effectively promote a sustainability transition, the policy process and cycle must be actively engaged with well-informed actors. This project will combine cutting-edge UK and Brazilian expertise in environmental policy and law with our state-of-the-art, detailed environmental policy modelling capacity to engage the Brazilian policy process in order to significantly improve policy-maker foresight and ultimately the resilience of Brazilian society to possible future global environmental and economic change through a sustainability transition.Finally, civil society and communities can be guided by sustainability projects that demonstrate best practice, exercises that can be scaled up and replicated. Building on previous successful experience of our Brazil-based team (the REGSA and JELARE projects), this project will also involve setting up small-scale sustainability demonstration and awareness-raising projects in order to show best-practice in each case and engage with the public. This will include a 'sustainable forest' project related to farming practices at the UNISUL university experimental farm, an 'energy forest' project related to the generation of sustainable forestry-related energy products, and a 'less hydro' simulation exercise to engage the public in understanding how to increase the resilience of the energy system to water scarcity.