The Nexus Climate-Water-Food-Energy through an Urban Lens will be held in Chapel Hill North Carolina from the 16-18th of April 2018. This is your chance to input to what will be the Chapel Hill Message for the High-Level Political Forum. We hope elements will be picked up by the negotiators for the Ministerial Declaration.
Registration and the agenda can be found here.
The conference will have sessions on the Nexus Challenge in the Urban Dimensions, How can a Nexus Approach Contribute to the Achievement of Multiple SDGs and Targets Simultaneously? Cross-Cutting Issues for the Nexus Themes; Nexus Partnerships: Sharing Experiences and Lessons Learned; Building Resiliency in American Cities; Making Science Relevant to Nexus Policy Making; Solutions and Tools for Accessing Renewable Energy in a Water-Stressed World; The Role of Integrated Water Management and the Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development Approaches in an Urbanized World; Funding the Nexus Approach in a Fair, Equitable and Green Economy and Capacity Development for the Nexus: Where do we Stand?
The “Nexus” approach is the one that focuses on overlaps across sectors while respecting sectoral expertise in order to make better plans by understanding interactions.
(Stockholm Environment Institute, 2017)
This will be the second Nexus Conference that The Water Institute has organized. The first in 2014 made a significant input to the negotiations for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), through the Chapel Hill Declaration.
The 2030 Agenda adopted in 2015 at its heart has 17 SDGs, 169 targets, and 232 indicators. It is the blueprint for a more sustainable, fair and equitable world. It is the first global agreement that recognizes the interlinkages between sectors and suggests ways to address them.
Since the 2014 conference a number of areas that interface with the Nexus discourse have developed and the conference will address three cross cutting areas.
These will be the urban challenge – where the Nexus tradeoffs really become vital to communities and people’s lives.
The conference will look at the health-related Nexus issues recognizing that with climate change these will increase.
Finally, it will look at the migration and mobility as governments and stakeholders start to develop the Global Compact on Migration over the next two years. Nexus issues play a critical role in the increase of migration as food and water become scarce and climate change impacts are increasingly have an effect.
The Nexus recognizes that there is no place in an interlinked world for isolated solutions aimed at just one sector. If the world is going to reduce hunger and eradicate poverty, achieving security for water, energy and food is critical. This challenge is becoming even more critical with the impacts of climate change, and water will be the medium by which we will address much of the Nexus.
The Nexus approach will maximize the benefits of sectoral expertise while working across the boundaries. It will seek practical and effective plans to better understand the interactions.
The Conference brings together scientists and academics, practitioners working in government, civil society and business, and other stakeholders to focus on how and why the nexus approach can be used on local and international levels.
See Nexus 2018: Water, Food, Energy, and Climate for further information.