ICTA-UAB to organize a new course on the water-energy-food nexus

The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) organizes a new session of the MOOC Course “Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food” which is starting on February 10th. The training will be given by researchers of the group Energy and integrated environmental assessment.

In this course, attendees will become familiar with the ideas of the water-energy-food nexus and transdisciplinary thinking. They will learn to see their community or country as a complex social-ecological system and to describe its water, energy and food metabolism in the form of a pattern, as well as to map the categories of social actors. Organizers will provide them with the tools to measure the nexus elements and to analyze them in a coherent way across scales and dimensions of analysis. In this way, their quantitative analysis will become useful for informed decision-making.

The course will provide the knowledge to be able to detect and quantify dependence on non-renewable resources and externalization of environmental problems to other societies and ecosystems (a popular ‘solution’ in the western world). Practical case studies, from both developed and developing countries, will help them evaluate the state-of-play of a given community or country and to evaluate possible solutions. Last but not least, they will learn to see pressing social-ecological issues, such as energy poverty, water scarcity and inequity, from a radically different perspective, and to question everything you’ve been told so far.

Part of the results and case studies presented have been developed within two projects: MAGIC and PARTICIPIA. However, the course does not reflect the views of the funding institutions or of the project partners as a whole, and the case studies were presented purely with an educational and illustrative purpose.

The course is directed toward upper-division undergraduate and graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines (environmental sciences, engineering, agricultural sciences, social sciences) as well as professionals (NGOs, think tanks) and policy makers concerned with sustainable development in both developed and developing countries.

Further information here