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New Book on the Collaborative Nexus Approach to Achieve Sustainability in the Pacific
As a result of a multi-year collaboration, UNESCO and Springer Nature, along with the Pacific Water Research Centre at Simon Fraser University (Canada), the University of New South Wales Global Water Institute (Australia), and the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (South Korea), are launching a new series, "The Water, Energy, and Food Security Nexus in Asia and the Pacific.鈥 Last month, on 22 April, Springer Nature published the Pacific volume of the three-volume book series.
Fueled by rapid urbanization, accelerated industrialization, and population growth, the Asia and the Pacific region face a multitude of social, economic, and environmental challenges. The recently launched Pacific volume aims to address these challenges and offers expert insights into future scenarios and solutions, specifically focusing on the Pacific region, which covers one-fifth of the Earth's surface with seventeen sovereign nations and seven territories.
This Pacific edition dives into the challenges of ensuring water, energy, and food security for the Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs). These challenges stem from two main sources: human induced climate change and the human population pressures.
Despite their cultural diversity and distinct traditions, Pacific islands share similar geographical features and opportunities. This allows for the development of a "Pacific-specific" WEF (water-energy-food security) nexus approach. The Nexus approach is a way to create policies that mutually benefit the growth in these sectors, while addressing potential tradeoffs and ensuring sustainable growth to meet the needs of future generations. This collaborative strategy focuses on coordinated decision-making across water, energy, and food sectors to enhance security in each area.
The Blue Continent of the Pacific is uniquely placed to utilize a nexus approach to water, energy and food security as a region comprised largely of small island developing states. This region鈥檚 high ambitions for climate action are a clarion call for a sustainable future and a nexus approach offers integrated environmental, societal, and economic benefits that will help achieve these ambitions.
The Pacific's unique character and the need for a Pasifika-led approach to sustainability across all aspects 鈥 environment, society, and economics 鈥 making it a worthy subject for a dedicated volume in the "Water Security in a New World" series.
"The Water, Energy, and Food Security Nexus in Asia and the Pacific鈥 is a series of three interconnected books claiming that the current, sector-by-sector approaches for management of water, energy, and food sectors stand inefficient, costly, and inadequate. The world鈥檚 leading experts in the region, who contributed to the content of these books, claim that a new and integrated approach must be adopted for this 鈥淣exus鈥 of water, energy, and food security. While three separate sub-regional books have been developed (East and Southeast Asia, Central and South Asia, and the Pacific) to accommodate the diversity of geographical, political, economic, social, and cultural diversity in the regions, several common threads of action have also emerged.
The Pacific volume has been a tremendous collaborative effort between 54 authors from across the Pacific and beyond. It was led by Global Water Institute, with University of New South Wales Humanitarian Engineering Senior Lecturer and Academic Lead Dr Andrew Dansie as Editor-in-Chief, and co-authored by Heidi K. Alleway, Senior Aquaculture Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, and Benno B枚er, Chief, Natural Sciences Unit at UNESCO New Delhi.
The Nexus approach in the book series offers a way to achieve a greater resilience in the society by building back better and choosing an alternative path for growth and development.
For more information, contact:
Benno B枚er: b.boer@unesco.org
