The project SIM4NEXUS “Sustainable Integrated Management FOR the NEXUS of water-land-food-energy-climate for a resource-efficient Europe” has been selected by the European Commission for an overall grant of nearly € 8,000,000. This H2020 project, which involves 26 partners from 15 countries, is led by Wageningen University (The Netherlands) and will run for 4 years (2016-2020).

SIM4NEXUS will develop innovative methodologies to facilitate the design of policies and bridge knowledge and technology gaps in the field of the water-land-food-energy-climate Nexus under climate change conditions. The project aims to develop a methodology of integration using a complexity science approach and a Serious Game, as an integrating tool for testing and evaluating policy decisions. The Serious Game will be operable at different scales ranging from regional to national, to continental, to global, as well as at different time horizons—short, medium and long-term.

“SIM4NEXUS has 4 objectives”, explains George Beers, the Project Coordinator, “namely to adopt existing knowledge and develop new expertise on the Nexus, to reduce uncertainties of how policies, governance and institutions affect complex changing environmental systems, to showcase the implementation by a network of regional and national case studies in Europe and to valorise the project outputs by creating project spinoffs.” Such approach is at the core of the EU research and innovation policy, as “this is an ambitious and challenging project which positions European research and business as frontrunners at the global level”.

The Technical University of Madrid (UPM) is one of the 26 project partners and leads the activities on the implementation of the thematic models for each case study under specific scenarios, both to support Nexus-compliant decision making and to provide input for the development of complexity methodologies.

Further information will be uploaded at http://www.sim4nexus.eu (under construction).

Contact UPM: Maria Blanco