Citizen-Led Community Innovation for Food Energy Water Nexus Resilience
- Imperial College, London (United Kingdom). Center for Environmental Policy
- Northern Arizona Univ., Flagstaff, AZ (United States)
- STEM & Leaf LLC, Tucson, AZ (United States)
- Northern Arizona Univ., Flagstaff, AZ (United States). Center for Science Teaching and Learning
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States). National Preparedness Analytics Center
Food-energy-water (FEW) resources are necessary for the function of multiple socio-natural systems. Understanding the synergies and trade-offs in the FEW nexus, and how these interconnections impact earth’s systems, is critical to ensure adequate access to these resources in the future; an essential component for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Scanlon et al., 2017). Although, over the last decade, the identification of FEW nexus complexities has increased at a global (IPCC, 2018; D’Orodico et al., 2018), national (Lant et al., 2019), and city scale (Rushforth and Ruddell, 2018), these findings are yet to be adequately translated into ‘on the ground’ action due a lack of technical and political capacity (Weitz et al., 2017). Specifically, local FEW systems have been overlooked in these analyses (Scanlon et al., 2017; Lant et al., 2019), thus leaving small and medium towns vulnerable due to a lack of data and inadequate FEW system management. Building on three years of field-tested FEW nexus research in the Ruddell Lab, we argue that participatory citizen science projects, such as our FEWSION for Community Resilience initiative, can bridge the data-policy gaps that exist within local FEW system management by: 1) providing last mile data on the FEW system, and 2) translating local data into evidence-based solutions at a grassroots level. Thus, we present a broadly applicable framework and call to action for local scale participatory citizen science to solve complex FEW nexus issues at a local, regional, and national scale.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE; U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA); National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-06CH11357; ACI-1639529
- OSTI ID:
- 1712699
- Journal Information:
- Frontiers in Environmental Science, Vol. 8; ISSN 2296-665X
- Publisher:
- Frontiers Research FoundationCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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