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Project Topic
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NexusLabs is a user-centered project. In view of the overall goal of improving the efficiency and sustainability of water, energy, and food use in Mediterranean irrigated agriculture, NexusLabs is aware that innovative agricultural practices are already available and mature to be implemented. However, barriers are hampering their effective and large-scale adoption/implementation. NexusLabs aims at detecting and overcoming those barriers by co-designing policy interventions and by strengthening ease-of-use in technology. For this purpose, it defines a 3-step process of parallel iterative strands, taking account of gender action principles and stakeholder knowledge in each step: First, it will assemble innovative technologies and/or strategies developed at sectoral level (that however serve multi-sectoral goals) and test them in a combined way at the pilot demonstration sites, accounting for the peculiarities of the socio-economic, technological, and institutional contexts in which those technologies should be implemented and adopted. Second, it will assess their impact from a WEFE nexus perspective and analyze scenarios. Third, it will upscale and spread their use among multi-actor user communities helping them to overcome the existing and potential barriers. In order to make this process effective, it has been designed to be conducted within the container of the Nexus Living Labs.
Its starting point are the users’ needs and behaviours. It responds to these needs by further developing, test-implementing, and demonstrating innovative technologies and/or strategies. Users’ behaviours will be accounted for to define effective strategies to enable the adoption of the innovative technologies. Barriers and enabling factors will be investigated.
The portfolio of these innovative solutions covers a range of novel smart farming techniques, agroecological practices and Nature-based Solutions (NbS), combined with alternative water and energy sources. NexusLabs is aware than the effective adoption of innovative solutions does not rely exclusively on the technological readiness. The social, economic, financial and institutional capacity of the target system is as important as the technological level. Therefore, NexusLabs will go beyond the state-of-art TRL and will develop and test an innovative Readiness Level (IRL) whose main scope is to better couple technologies and contexts, enabling the effective adoption at large scale. The IRL will be assessed in two sequential time steps, i.e. ex-ante and ex-post.
Once the technologies/strategies are test-implemented and demonstrated, a process of analysis of scenarios and impacts is started, always taking into account the full WEFE nexus, including aspects of climate change (WEFE-C). The set of analysis and assessment tools/approaches covers a novel (more comprehensive) nexus index (WEFEi), a novel integration of PSDM with ABM and spatial aspects, and a range of techniques of multi-actor multi-level analysis (SEA, sMCA, LCSA).
The conclusions from the demonstration and nexus-analysis are then reported back to the users at all levels in order to help them incorporate them into their daily practice. These approaches are training, business models, policy mix, upscaling, and further multi-actor practices.
Within this concept, the pilots are the testbeds for nexus analysis of innovative technologies/strategies. They are conceived as Living Labs, with core users actively collaborating in each phase of the project and other stakeholders involved in different ways. Nexus Living Labs will be established in 7 Mediterranean countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Spain).
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