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In Africa structural changes are occurring across economic and environmental systems. These are driven by a steeply growing and increasingly urbanised population, a strong and yet unequal economic growth, regional and global climate change, and behavioural shifts. Together, these challenges call for an integrated approach to assess challenges and their solutions. The food supply-chain depend ever more on artificial irrigation, which withdraws and distribute water with technology and the input of energy; water is also required to fill the large hydroelectric dam reservoir basins which supply the bulk of the power consumed in the continent, and to meet municipal and industrial needs; climate change affects all these dynamics, which in turn have strong implications for greenhouse gases emission; economic growth and sustainable development objectives shown linkages with each of these spheres which simply cannot be ignored; new geopolitical equilibria are emerging due to the necessity to manage common goods and resources, such as transboundary river basins. The NEXUS-A projects aims at analysing different aspects of the NEXUS – namely the sectoral and regional interdependencies – in an integrated fashion. These involve water, agriculture, energy, climate, the economy, and (geo)politics.

  • Development of integrated environmental and economic modelling tools to analyze NEXUS interdependencies and propose effective solutions.
  • Geopolitical and geoeconomic analysis of the implications of NEXUS, with particular attention to environmental public goods.
  • Evaluation of the change in regional diets and their regional and global environmental and energy impacts.
  • Development and application of a rural electrification model capable of capturing the demand for resources and energy in the agricultural sector (irrigation, processing of agricultural products …) and proposing integrated technological solutions.

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