The goal of the proposed 6-year Partnership, “Solving the Sustainability Challenges at the Food-Climate-Biodiversity Nexus” (Solving-FCB), is to support and facilitate the development of viable FCB solutions that explicitly consider their complex social and ecological contexts. The Solving-FCB Partnership brings together world-leading scholars and practitioners from academic institutes, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, and government agencies to undertake transdisciplinary research that examines policies and human actions at the intersection of achieving food security, climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation goals.
Specifically, the Partnership will examine the following higher-level questions:
- What are the consequences of farming and aquaculture development on biodiversity and climate?
- How do climate adaptation for fisheries and agriculture affect food production, biodiversity and societal wellbeing?
- How can biodiversity and other living resources be managed to support food security and climate adaptation?
- How can ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches and the development of ‘desirable futures’ scenarios, coupled with the appropriate decision support framework, be useful to inform local actions and for taking account of local actions in global agreements, to solve FCB challenges?
To answer these questions, the Partnership has three overarching objectives:
- Develop pluralistic visions of ‘desirable’ futures of FCB;
- Identify priorities and examine consequences of actions to build nexus-informed pathways for transforming and transitioning to ‘desirable’ FCB futures;
- Develop a systematic procedure and toolkit to co-identify solution options with stakeholders, rights-holders, and knowledge-holders to address the interactions between FCB and other sustainability challenges.
The Partnership is grounded on five case studies that focus on FCB challenges under a range of societal and environmental contexts. Through case studies in Canada, China, Costa Rica, Ghana/Nigeria and the Netherlands, the Partnership aims to elucidate specific policy-related questions under different decision-making contexts. Although independent of each other, the case studies align in their common exploration of visions and pathways to achieve FCB goals. Outcomes from the case studies will be integrated to address the partnership’s overarching goals and objectives. We will use both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse relationships and feedback in FCB systems, including integrated modelling and scenarios development to evaluate temporal and spatial dynamics and impacts in response to FCB-related actions, and co-production of knowledge with stakeholders and rights-holders to make the research relevant to real world decision-making.
