Title: Unintended Consequences: Unknowable and Unavoidable, or Knowable and Unforgivable?

Abstract - Paraphrase - there are multiple environmental limits within which humanity can safely operate, - potential negative outcomes of seemingly positive actions need to accounted for. - “nexus” research is consistent with the above - it recognizes the integrated and interactive nature of water, energy and food systems, - and aims to understand the broader implications of developments in any one of these systems. - This article presents a novel framework for categorizing such detrimental unintended consequences, based upon: - how much is known about the system in question - and the scope for avoiding any such unintended consequences. - The framework comprises four categories: - Knowable and Avoidable - Knowable and Unavoidable - Unknowable and Avoidable - Unknowable and Unavoidable - The categories are explored with reference to examples in both: - the water-energy-food nexus and - planetary boundary frameworks. - The examples: - highlight the potential for the unexpected to happen and - explore dynamic nature of the situations that give rise to the unexpected. - The article concludes with guidance on how the framework can be used - to increase confidence that best efforts have been made to navigate our way toward - secure and sustainable water, energy and food systems, - avoiding and/or managing unintended consequences along the way.

// - This paper is principally about - progress traps, - how they emerge, - their characteristics - as they morph through the knowability / avoidability matrix - and how we might predict and mitigate them in the future

• Title = Water-Food-Energy Nexus i
• n Global Cities:

• Addressing Complex Urban Interdependencies

• Abstract

  • Understanding how water, food, and energy interact in the form of the water-food-energy (WFE) nexus is essential for sustainable development which advocates enhancing human well-being and poverty reduction.

  • The application of the WFE nexus has seen diverse approaches to its implementation in cities across the globe.

  • There is a need to share knowledge in order to improve urban information exchange which focuses on the WFE nexus’ application and impacts on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.
  • In this study,
    • Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
    • Affinity Propagation Algorithm (APA)
  • are employed to explore and assess the application of the WFE nexus:
    • first on a regional basis
    • second on the city level
  • The results show that after the exhaustive search of a database containing:
    • 32,736 case studies focusing on
    • 2,233 cities,
  • African and Latin American cities:
  • have the most potential to encounter resource shortages (i.e., WFE limitation)
    • are systematically underrepresented in literature
    • Southern hemisphere cities can benefit from knowledge transfer because of their limited urban intelligence programmes.
  • Hence, with regional and topic bias,
  • there is a potential for more mutual learning links
  • between cities that can increase WFE nexus policy exchange
  • between the Northern and Southern hemispheres
  • through the bottom-up case-study knowledge.