Introduction of key nexus indicators to assess the urban food-water-energy nexus within the SUNEX project

Within the SUGI initiative addressing the challenges of sustainable urban food, water and energy nexus (FWE-Nexus) the ongoing project SUNEX -funded by JPI Urban Europe in collaboration with the Belmont forum- is developing an integrated interdisciplinary approach to analyse the intersection between FWE systems. It aims at supporting cities’ decision-making process in formulating inclusive and sustainable urban FWE–strategies. The project has established an integrated modelling framework to model FWE demand and supply and assess their key intersections through a nexus approach that endorses sustainable and efficient solutions to cover cities FWE-demand. The modelling framework is being applied in 4 case studies for the cities Berlin, Bristol, Doha and Vienna. The applied Nexus-approach relies on profound urban FWE-data and consistent socio-economic and technological development scenarios constructed within a co-creation process supported by cities’ stakeholder dialogue (Hainoun and Loibl, 2019). To address the complex interlinkages between the three systems and capture their key synergies, SUNEX has developed a novel concept called “Key Nexus Indicators (KINs)” that helps to quantify and monitor the key nexus-effects of urban FWE systems. The introduced KNIs are classified into two categories, addressing either dual effects (FW, FE, EW) or triple effects referring jointly to the 3 FWE systems. Altogether 6 triple KNIs and 22 dual KNIs of FWE-Nexus effects have been specified. The introduced KNIs are quantified based on the results of the developed future FWE demand-supply scenarios formulated using the established SUNEX-modelling framework. The scenario results are monitored and evaluated to specify the strength of coupling effects (nexus-grade) using the introduced KNIs.