Food-Water-Energy for Urban Sustainable Environments

Innovative policies and governance forms are needed to address competition for scarce resources in stressed urban food-water-energy (FWE) systems. The FUSE consortium, supported by the Belmont Forum and other sponsors, adopts an innovative two-stage Living Lab approach in which stakeholders:

• Produce solutions for future urban-FWEs challenges
• Engage in participatory model building, and
• Examine the merits of proposed solutions.

Detailed system models quantify connections and feedbacks among users, producers, distribution mechanisms, and resources. The FUSE approach has been applied to Amman, Jordan and Pune, India: growing metropolitan regions each containing approximately five million people, intermittent freshwater supplies, and significant competition with agriculture for water and energy.

The FUSE consortium created implementable solutions to meet the urban-FWE challenge with a development path that is sustainable and adapted to local needs. Pune (India, monsoonal) and Amman (Jordan, semi-arid) were selected as representative of different archetypal expressions of urban FEW challenges. The transdisciplinary team adopted a systems approach to human-biophysical-engineered interactions. For the first time, this project constructed multi-agent urban-FWE system models for each region to capture connections and feedbacks among users, producers, distribution mechanisms, and resources. Under narratives of future changes in climate, demographics, land use, and economic development, together with a wide range of actors in these cities, the team developed and evaluated policy interventions and innovative governance forms to identify implementable sustainability options. Through 2-Stage Sustainability Living Labs in these cities, they engaged in stakeholder participatory model building to construct (Stage 1) user-inspired and user-oriented future narratives and proposed potential solutions. They used simulated policy-evaluation results (Stage 2) as the basis for discussion with stakeholders of the benefits of those solutions. With stakeholders, they identified means to overcome impediments to sustainability and resource equity. The FUSE framework is flexible, transferrable, and broadly applicable to the urban-FWE challenge.

See F.U.S.E. reports and other outcomes