This book puts the spotlight on Southern Africa, presenting a cutting-edge concept never previously explored in the context of climate change and putting forward arguments for regional integration and cooperation. The Climate Resilient Infrastructure Development Facility (CRIDF) is the new water infrastructure program of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) for Southern Africa. The CRIDF promotes the establishment of small to medium-scale infrastructure across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) through technical assistance aimed at developing sustainable pro-poor projects, while also facilitating access to the financial resources needed to deliver said infrastructure. Further, it focuses on regional water resource management goals and basin plans, as well as on building climate resilience for the beneficiary communities. The Facility’s Virtual Water and Nexus Project works to improve regional peace dividends by translating the Nexus concept into national and regional policies; it ultimately promotes sovereign security through greater regional integration across the water, food and energy sectors, while taking into account potential benefits in connection with carbon sequestration and emission mitigation.

Promoting Equity, Cooperation and Innovation in the Fields of Transboundary Waters and Natural Resources Management offers publications and essays by colleagues around the world on the prolific work and scientific contribution of Dr David J.H. Phillips, giving insight into a remarkable and ingenious scientist who lived life to the utmost.

This book explores how integrated management of environmental resources via a Nexus Approach can help to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It takes a process-oriented view on what should or needs to be done to implement a Nexus Approach and how this relates to SDGs. After sketching the background and conceptual outline, contributions to the book explore key aspects of monitoring and implementation. Specifically, they: focus on the importance of monitoring resource use and how to advance it at the international level to support SDG implementation, exemplify the resources perspective on the nexus approach by exploring how to close the nitrogen cycle and stay within planetary boundaries, elaborate on proven and emerging strategies for nexus implementation, highlighting means to enhance, monitor and analyse stakeholder participation, explain how the horizontal and vertical nexus dimensions interact and can support SDG implementation. The book sheds new light on key aspects of the interrelation between SDGs and the Nexus Approach and provides specific recommendations how to advance it.

This book focuses on mega-droughts of the past 20 years. Twelve cases from both developed and developing countries are elaborated in the book. Its intention is to draw lessons from the cases of extremely severe water shortages so that countries and stakeholders can be better prepared for extreme drought events in the future. Several recurrent themes emerge from the diverse case studies and descriptions of programs. For example, most chapters discuss the necessity to move from reactive (compensatory) to preventive policies. This theme has implications for use of insurance in developing countries, e.g. is insurance encouraging investments to help countries avoid disasters or is it acting mostly in a humanitarian way to compensate for losses to help people? Several authors point to the importance of risk assessment and to developing risk based policies for drought. This raises statistical issues of how such assessments of uncertainty and risks are done and how they relate to actual occurrence of events. Most chapters call for more inter-sectoral policies, policies which integrate water resources management approaches and to the necessity of raising public awareness of droughts in times of no drought. The issue of structural versus nonstructural is clear in most cases. While often cast as ‘either/or’ the message that emerges is more one of how do you integrate these approaches. Finally, a few chapters bring to light how prevention is needed for national security as well as water security. In Focus – a book series that showcases the latest accomplishments in water research. Each book focuses on a specialist area with papers from top experts in the field. It aims to be a vehicle for in-depth understanding and inspire further conversations in the sector.

Editorial: Tuyeni H Mwampamba, Rob Bailis, Adrian Ghilardi Urbanization, food, and water consumption trends in many tropical countries show that demand for charcoal (as a source of cooking energy), meat, grain and water will rise to proportions that surpass the ability of existing ecosystems to supply these services simultaneously and at desired qualities. Consequently, drastic changes to policy and practice are needed to improve ecosystem potential and/or alter demand trends. Traditional charcoal production in sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia and Latin America often competes or co-exists with livestock keeping and agriculture and has a tendency to occur in water-limited woodlands. The co-occurrence of charcoal and food production results in complex landscapes characterized by strong interactions between subsystems, managed by multiple sets of actors, with potentially competing objectives. These social-ecological systems provide goods and services that are essential to millions of people throughout the global south. Nevertheless, there have been very few detailed studies of such systems, particularly on the individual and combined effects of charcoal, crop, and livestock production on the hydrological system that maintains them and vice versa. As a result, these multi-use landscapes are typically managed by short-sighted, highly generalized, mono-sectorial policies that ignore important tradeoffs and undercapitalize on synergies. A system-level approach could provide important insights that improve and expand current understanding of this energy-food-water nexus. Tackling urgent and complex problems composed of multiple and interrelated factors lies at the heart of nexus thinking - an approach that “examines the inter-relatedness and interdependencies of environmental resources and their transitions and fluxes across spatial scales and between compartments” (UNU-FLORES 2015) and relies on interdisciplinary research and multi-sector policy teams. It has attracted significant interest from international organizations, the private sector and governments as a way to develop integrated equitable solutions that involve inputs from multiple stakeholders. However, this approach is notably absent in the research arena. Identifying appropriate interventions for achieving sustainable charcoal and food production and maintaining the underlying hydrological system on which they depend requires that the systems are considered simultaneously and that their biophysical, social, and political inter-relations are well understood. Taking charcoal as the nexus entry-point, this Research Topic aims to generate new understanding of charcoal production systems by incorporating agriculture and hydrology into the matrix. We were interested in empirical articles, reviews, meta-analytical articles and perspective papers that address at least two of the three nexus components and which offer provocative and insightful perspectives into the nexus as a whole. We hope that this Research Topic will 1) facilitate identification of research gaps, policy opportunities and priorities for the nexus, 2) kick-start the development of a community of researchers and practitioners working on the nexus, and 3) permit the development of a research agenda that explores the nexus globally across multiple study sites.

The book’s primary intention is to serve as a roadmap for professionals working in developing countries interested in the Nexus Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) approach. The book shows a multi-disciplinary approach, showcasing the importance of the proper use of Nexus WEFE when implementing certain development programs in regions around the globe. It can be presented as a manual for an individual that either wishes to implement intervention projects following the NEXUS approach or students interested in cooperation and development. The book begins with a general explanation of the theoretical concepts and implementation processes of Nexus WEFE and continues getting into case studies, explaining the importance of proper implementation and potential drawbacks and solutions to them. This book has a particular focus on the European Union cooperation policies when implementing such an approach in developing countries.

Water is intricately linked with food security, energy security, and sustainable development. As the world is moving towards sustainable development goals, it is critical to recognize the role of water in attaining these goals. The Water-Energy-Food Nexus draws attention to the complex and interrelated nature of global resource systems and forces us to think about how a decision in one sector impacts other interlinked sectors as well. This book looks at the three dimensions of sustainable developmentenvironment, economics and society – and how water is linked with them and explores the nexus approach as a framework to look at the issues and identify solutions.