The ‘nexus’ is now widely recognized as a promising approach to reconciling the sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems with the needs of development, including the growing demand for energy, food and water. A nexus approach reveals how management decisions regarding one resource or sector impact on other resources and sectors, quantifying the feedbacks and links between them. It identifies externalities, interactions, and potential trade-offs at different scales. Importantly, it can highlight where sector-based plans are incompatible, making it possible to avert unintended consequences and find optimal solutions.
Although the nexus approach is being widely discussed, few activities to date have been both driven by genuine demand and based on a consistent analytical framework and nexus tools – a combination that allows the benefits of a nexus approach for decision and policy-making to be mapped and measured.
This project is among the first to apply the integrated nexus toolkit developed by SEI. This discussion brief, first published in August 2013 and updated in May 2014, introduces the project and outlines some initial findings that are supporting the work of government planners and other stakeholders.
Download the brief (PDF, 792kb)
