FEW Workshop: Food, Energy, and Water Nexus in Sustainable Cities

New York Institute Of Technology, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

1541866 (Assaf- Anid). The workshop "Food, Energy, and Water (FEW) Nexus in Sustainable Cities," to be held in Beijing on October 20 and 21, 2015, will convene participants from both the United States and China. Both nations are principal actors in global sustainability. The FEW workshop will provide participants from both nations opportunities to explore scientific challenges of mutual interest in sustainability and stressors on the built environment in relation to the FEW nexus. The workshop's programming team is led by New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in collaboration with Peking University (PKU). Several academic, government, and private entities will be actively engaged in planning the workshop, including from the United States: NYIT (Dr. Nada Assaf-Anid), and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and its Institute for Sustainability (AIChE-IfS, Dr. Darlene Schuster), and from China: Peking University (Dr. Chunmiao Zheng) and Wuhan University (Dr. Xiaohui Cui), along with representatives from the various agencies in the U.S. and China. The overarching goal of the workshop is to stimulate basic research on the interdependence of systems involving agriculture, water, and energy, as well as to identify barriers to sustainability in food production, transport, distribution, use, and access in urban environments. The workshop will cover several research areas, including sustainability and life-cycle assessment challenges in addressing complex systems-based indicators and responses to stressors and coupling those responses to the FEW system, as well as technology breakthroughs and approaches for more efficient FEW resource utilization and reuse in cities. The workshop will enhance scientific cooperation between U.S. and Chinese scholars, educators, industry practitioners, government agency representatives, urban planners and policymakers. The workshop is to result in a white paper on scientific, engineering and information systems and data challenges in understanding FEW systems. This workshop is co-funded by the CBET/ENG Environmental Sustainability program and the Global Venture Fund (GVF) of the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE).