The Energy-Water-Food Nexus: The Emerging Challenge to Sustainable Prosperity Do, Learn, Share – Together.

The Energy-Water-Food Nexus: The Emerging Challenge to Sustainable Prosperity

 

09 September 2012
Jeju, South Korea
Today at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, I had the good fortune of chairing a most interesting workshop on addressing resource scarcity. It was organised by Shell. Over the coming two decades, the growth of population and prosperity will significantly increase the global demand for energy, water and food, perhaps beyond planetary boundaries. This is known as the ‘stress nexus’ and how are we to address it?
Allard Castelein (Shell) explained that because sustainable development is at the core of business at Shell, the company will need to face tough choices about the linkages between its supply of energy and the interconnected demands for water and food. For example, biofuels may offer a fast route for reducing carbon emissions, but it may also compete with food security. The company sees a need, indeed a necessity, to collaborate with others – companies, NGOs, governments and communities – to find solutions to the emerging stress nexus.
As a first step, Shell is beginning to understand its use of water for energy production. Recently the company has been able to establish a water accounting methodology and build an overall picture of its water usage. Shell is now able to identify projects which are water-friendly such as its multibillion dollar biofuel venture in Brazil which depends purely on rain water and does not compete with food production or protection of the Amazon rainforest. Other examples include the use of a strict environmental standard to limit fresh water usage in the gas to liquids processes in Qatar or the use of reed beds in Oman to clean water extracted with oil. Allard proposed that we need to undertake many such pilots projects and to work together to build new models and technologies based on the insights from these pilots.
The workshop provided an excellent opportunity for a panel of four to comment on Shell’s proposal that we need to work together to find solutions to the energy-water-food nexus:

• Mark Weick (Dow Chemical) agreed that we now needed cooperation among sectors as no one sector or company has the answers. He warned that that the stress nexus will lead to continual shocks at local, regional and global levels and that we will need to put effort into building resilience. Especially worrying is the degraded and fragile state of many ecosystems some of which could collapse in response to a shock. Thus at Dow Chemical they see a need to understand the value of ecosystems and their services for the company in order to support efforts to restore and protect them.
• Nigel Winser (Earthwatch Institute) explained that Shell’s attention to the stress nexus is helping us to adopt a more holistic approach and to begin to understand the integrated functionality of landscapes. He agreed on the need for cooperation, notably the need for trusted dialogues between communities, science, corporates and decisions-makers.
• Peter Cunningham (Rio Tinto) explained how the mining company has traditionally focused on its own footprint. Though the company has gotten better at addressing its resource dependencies and impacts, it will not be able to address the stress nexus on its own. New thinking and new management approaches are needed and this requires building new partnerships with others.
• Poul Engberg-Pedersen (IUCN) proposed that thinking about the energy-water-food nexus lifts sustainability from a CSR issue to the strategic business level. However, the dots in the nexus still need to be connected. We are facing a global stress nexus, but how does this translate to corporate level strategy and, in turn, how does this strategy link to pilot projects on the ground? Clearly we need to develop natural resource governance structures and schemes, such as payments for ecosystem services, which will help us to allocate resources effectively and fairly. Importantly, we will also need to address how we can change our lifestyles as well as improving resource efficiencies.

IUCN – the International Union for Conservation of Nature – is made up of government and non-government members committed to conserving the integrity and diversity of nature. For over a decade now the business community has become more and more engaged with the work of IUCN, particularly with respect to corporate biodiversity responsibility. In this workshop, Shell – one of the world’s largest companies – went a step further and challenged the IUCN community to think carefully about their efforts to conserve landscapes and ecosystems in the face of massively growing demand for energy, water and food.
Shell proposes collaboration to pilot new approaches, development new technologies and build new models of doing business in order to address the stress nexus. The panel members agreed that we will need increased multi-stakeholder collaboration to discover new approaches to making prosperity sustainable. I came away from the workshop with four words: Do, Learn, Share – Together. Interestingly, in this regard, leadership from business within the conservation community has important role to play.