EAGER: FEWSTERN: US-China Food-Energy-Water Systems Transdisciplinary Environmental Research Network

University Of Tennessee Institute Of Agriculture, Knoxville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Food production and quality are closely linked to use of energy and water and overall ecosystem health. As demand for food, energy, and water all increase due to increased population and changes in diet, it is essential to consider the balance of energy, water, and land resource uses to achieve food and nutrition security, economic goals, and essential ecosystem functions and services. Typical research projects are rather narrowly-focused and carried out by individual disciplines. However, in order to address broad challenges and enable sustainable solutions, collaboration among different disciplines is essential. This grant aims to increase the understanding among different academic disciplines in the US and China of approaches for addressing increasingly important challenges related to competition among food, energy, and water systems (FEWS). Typically, development of technologies, policies, and management systems for food, energy, and water systems are done without considering various tradeoffs that may occur, competing demands for resources for each of these basic human needs, and potential conflicts in policies that regulate each of them. The goal of this project is to enable networking and meetings among different science and engineering disciplines to identify food, energy, and water systems to be studied holistically so that increases in productivity and efficiency can be achieved for systems that provide for increasing demands for these resources. The project will enable scientists and engineers to develop teams to address specific FEW systems and to develop interdisciplinary concepts. This project will support activities that will enable innovative ideas to be developed through interactions among different disciplines involved in various aspects of food, energy and water research. These will range from technological to social and policy innovations for FEWS program development beyond national borders, and contribute concepts for local, national and global solutions to achieve sustainable intensification of natural resource exploitation and use. The project will establish a US-China crosscutting research coordination network to (i) identify transdisciplinary environmental grand challenge research opportunities at the FEWS nexus, (ii) develop a framework to overcome hurdles to interdisciplinary research both between and among collaborating US and China researchers, and (iii) establish model platforms for education, training, communication and efficacy evaluations of the outputs of international cooperation. Over a 2-year period of strategic research planning, identification of grand challenges, and teaming workshops, FEWSTERN will generate technical whitepapers and guidance documents supporting international collaboration and research. US and Chinese graduate students will communicate project outcomes and goals via social media outlets. Novel system level research will generate opportunities for academia-industry partnerships at the FEWS nexus.