Nexusing water, energy and food to increase resilience in the Cape Town metropolitan region
The Cooperation South Africa – the Netherlands research programme has granted a Utrecht University project working on the water-energy-food nexus in South Africa. The project Nexusing water, energy and food to increase resilience in the Cape Town metropolitan region is a collaboration between the faculties of Geosciences and Law, Economics and Governance that will focus on different resource crises affecting Cape Town.
The project is part of the Merian Fund which encourages cooperation between Dutch and South Africa academic institutions and is funded by the NWO (Netherlands) and NRF (South Africa). The project aims to explore ways to improve the capacity of Cape Town’s urban residents and authorities to prepare for, cope with, and learn from resource crises in the city through more integrated infrastructure planning. A guiding question is how can water, energy and food governance systems be better coordinated to increase urban sustainability. And how do the Netherlands and South Africa compare in this regard?