Cities around the globe are struggling to meet the needs of their citizens with respect to food, energy and water. These three sectors are inextricably linked and actions in one sector more often have impacts in one or both others; these interacting sectors can therefore be seen as a Food-Energy-Water Nexus (FEW Nexus) of systems. The ERANET Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative (EN-SUGI) brought together the fragmented research and innovation expertise across Europe and beyond to find innovative new solutions to this FEW Nexus challenge. Furthermore, by linking the activity of the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe and the Belmont Forum (BF), EN-SUGI developed more resilient, applied urban solutions that bring research and innovation together from across the globe, and which will benefit a much wider range of global markets. EN-SUGI was a project that foresees the financial participation of 17 European Funding Agencies and 7 from outside EU (US, Argentina, Brasil, Japan, Chinese Tapei, Quatar). EN-SUGI Main objectives and impacts were to support development of practical innovations and new collaborative research that will allow urban areas to understand and address the challenges of the Food-Energy-Water systems. (Impact = 15 projects funded, and 15 cities/local authorities engaged);
to provide a framework for aligning R&I agendas of JPI Urban Europe and the BF. The alignment will help foster transdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation in research and innovation, and facilitate the use of global expertise and knowledge (Impact = 24 funding organisations involved) EN-SUGI fostered development of international relationships between the different parts of the research and innovation community – to enable them to contribute to addressing those challenges and goals, while aligning them to wider, strategic initiatives, including the EU agenda, Green Deal, SRIA agenda, Future Earth and UN –Habitat
