Project description
Sustainable water-energy-food infrastructure pathways for Sub-Saharan Africa
An accelerated scale-up of renewable energy sources will bring many benefits. Climate resilient investments are vital for transition to renewable energy infrastructures. Success hinges on the policy environments and governance structures. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), clean energy access and food security targets require significant infrastructure expansion. In this context, the EU-funded EPIC Africa project will build on transparent water-energy-food and resource modelling tools for integrated assessment. Overall, the project’s goal is to support the governance of sustainable development in SSA, which has the lowest energy access and irrigated agriculture levels in the world. Focusing on the Tana (Kenya) and Volta (Ghana-Burkina Faso) river basins, the project will co-design policy for the coming decades together with stakeholders and local research networks.
Objective
Achieving clean energy access and food security targets in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will require significant infrastructure expansion. Improved policy environments and governance structures are recognised as vital in scaling up funding for climate-resilient investments in renewable energy infrastructures. The efficient exploitation of land, energy and water resources and their synergised use for sustainable economic development, as well as their robustness to stressors from climate change require integrated optimisation and assessment of strategic plans in these sectors. Working with existing, widely adopted, open-source modelling tools and data, the EPIC Africa project will build on the transparent integrated assessment, and resource modelling, connecting to the already existing community of developers and users. The project will create a network of African experts to train, co-create and sustain the tools developed in the long term, which is lacking at the moment. The project will build advanced and spatially contextualised water-energy-food (WEF) models for long-term infrastructure planning. Operational WEF models with sufficient temporal and spatial resolution will be developed and used to verify cost-optimised infrastructure investment plans under different climate and socioeconomic scenarios. EPIC Africa sets out to support governance of sustainable development in SSA by forming and connecting a transition arena with stakeholders in dialogue, leading to the development of a WEF nexus digital engagement tool. Optimal use of shared resources will be exemplified for Africa using the cases of the Volta and Tana river basins. Here, we will design specific policy, investment and infrastructure plans for the coming decades in the agricultural, water and energy access sectors. The project will produce a set of institutional, regulatory and technical recommendations for sustainable management of optimised transition pathways.
Fields of science
- social sciencessociologygovernance
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energy
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesnutrition
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental scienceshydrologydrainage basins
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
2628 CN Delft
Netherlands