Challenge
Water, energy, food, forests and biodiversity systems are strongly interconnected and are critical to rural livelihoods and food and nutrition security. However, governments, stakeholders and investors struggle to manage systems change in the water-energy-food-ecosystems nexus and ensure changes are robust under climate change.
The transboundary nature of basins makes integrated and sustainable management of water, energy, food and ecosystems challenging. Systems thinking helps avoid unintended consequences that would jeopardize sustainability and possibly exacerbate conflict. Good governance across boundaries and sectors requires strong institutions and actors willing to overcome silos and adopt new tools to support nexus approaches.
Objective
This Initiative aims to realize gains across water, energy, food and ecosystems — with a focus on forests and biodiversity for the ecosystem component — in selected transboundary river basins by leading global nexus thinking and providing tools, guidelines, training and facilitation for analysis and research for development.
