Global Center on Climate Change and Water Energy Food Health Systems - Research Project

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RESEARCH PROJECT ABSTRACT Understanding the interconnectedness between water, energy, food, and health (WEFH) systems and the interdependence of the challenges to each of these systems at different scales is crucial to achieving sustainable development and promoting the well-being of individuals and communities. Despite growing evidence of the tight interconnectedness of WEFH, little coordination exists for planning, financing, and governing these sectors. This project will lead to the development of a dynamic decision support tool for the WEFH system of systems to catalyze a dialogue between these sectors to prioritize interventions. This will guide evidence-based actions to improve community health resilience under growing adverse climatic, demographic, and geopolitical changes. The strain on society for limited access to safe, adequate water is a major problem in Jordan, and the impact of climate change is a contributing factor to increased water salinity, lead to further water scarcity and related adverse health outcomes. The initial research project proposed as part of the planning for the proposed Global Climate Change Center on Water, Energy, Food, and Health (GC3WEFH) will explore the use of a systems-level approach for the development of a decision-making software tool. This WEFH tool will then be applied to assess interventions in the community in terms of their impact in the context of the WEFH system. We hypothesize that Decreasing diseases frequencies as an indication of community resilience can be achieved by evidence-based, system-level interventions across water, energy, food, and health systems. An initial exploration of one such intervention will be to put health at the center of the WEFH nexus through the increase in access to higher quality water in climate-vulnerable communities. The conceptual framework for this nexus will be investigated and answered through interactions with community stakeholders followed by the development of a user-friendly quantitative scenario-analysis tool for stakeholder use, implementation of technological and behavioral interventions, and then evaluation of outcomes, advantages, and opportunities for future applications based on the results. The WEFH tool will create opportunities for dialogue and synergies between WEFH disciplines that currently do not exist. The success of this project will provide the proposed center with the foundational tools needed for future research efforts to address not only access to safe water for drinking and cooking in Jordan, but also to develop other climate-change interventions at the WEFH nexus using evidence-based approaches that can be scaled up across the region and globally. 1