WEF Nexus

SNIP Speaker Series
2019-09-20 11:00 - 2019-10-23 12:30 UTC | Pennsylvania State University
Strategic Networks and Initiatives Program (SNIP) Fall 2019 Speaker Series at Penn State
“Building a Food-Water-Energy Nexus Community of Transformative and Convergent Research”
Upcoming Events:

Friday, September 20, 11:00 AM

Seminar with Claudia Ringler, Deputy Director of Environment and Production Technology Division at IFPRI, entitled:
“The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Insights from Global, Basin and Local Case Studies of Growing
Natural Resource Scarcity in the Eastern Nile Basin”

Friday, September 20, 4:00 PM

Geography Coffee Hour with Claudia Ringerl, IFPRI, entitled:
“Achieving nutrition outcomes through improved agricultural water management: What are the options?”

Tuesday, October 8, 12:00 PM

Seminar with Chris Scott, Professor and University Distinguished Scholar at University of Arizona, entitle:
“Sustaining Groundwater Irrigation in Breadbasket Regions: A Water-Energy-Food Nexus Diagnostic Assessment”

Wednesday, October 23, 12:30 PM

Seminar with Steve Davis, Associate Professor, Earth System Science at University of California Irvine, entitled:
“Integrated and Transdisciplinary Analyses of Food-Energy-Water Systems”
Dates and times of the following to be determined:
Webinar by Arjen Hoekstra, Professor in Water Management at University of Twente, Netherlands
Mathew Kurian, Research Assistant Professor at Penn State and former Academic Officer at UNU-Flores, Germany

SNIP: Claudia Ringler
2019-09-20
Strategic Networks and Initiatives Program (SNIP) Fall Speaker Series
On September 20th, a seminar and coffee hour with Claudia Ringer was held at Penn State University. Claudia Ringler was appointed deputy division director of the Environment and Production Technology Division at IFPRI in 2011. Claudia manages IFPRI’s Water Research group and since 2015 is also the Natural Resource Management Theme lead.
Seminar title: “The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Insights from Global Basin, and Local Case Studies of Growing Natural Resource Scarcity in the Eastern Nile Basin.”
The geography coffee hour title: “Achieving Nutrition Outcomes through Improved Water Management: What are the Options?”
Watch video recording of seminar here

SNIP: Ben Ruddell
2019-09-13
Strategic Networks and Initiatives Program (SNIP) Speaker Series
Ben Ruddell, Ph.D., P.E., Director Associate Professor of the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University and Director of FEWSION project, held the webinar, “FEWSION, a National U.S. Mesoscale Supply Chain Network” on September 13th.
FEWSION is an empirical description of the U.S. food, energy, and water system. The FEWSION project is a Big Data Fusion project to create and explore the first mesoscale map of the U.S. food, energy, and water (+everything) system. It is the first complete footprint database for every US city (water, greenhouse gases, etc.) along with vulnerability and resilience benchmarks.
Click here to view recorded webinar
Click here to explore the FEWSION website
Click here to view the FEW-View educational map tool

UNFCCC Technical Expert Meetings on Mitigation (TEM-M)
2019-06-20 13:00 - 2019-06-21 19:00 (Europe/Helsinki)
The UNFCCC Technical Expert Meetings on Mitigation will be held at The Bonn Climate Change Conference (SB 50) in Bonn, Germany on June 20th and 21st from 11:00 to 19:00 (CEST). UNFCCC will be running a live webcast available to those not in physical attendance.
The meetings aim to promote sustainability of the water-energy-food nexus to address the issues related to increasing demand for food from a growing global population which, in addition to climate change, is placing significant pressure on agricultural production and natural resources.
During the sessions, governments and non-party stakeholders will explore high-potential mitigation policies, practices, and technologies with significant sustainable development co-benefits, with the potential in increase pre-2020 climate ambition. It will be led and organized by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), and the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), supported by the UNFCCC secretariat.
The event will consist of the following six sessions:
Session 1: Decarbonizing the primary production phase of the agri- food chain
Session 2: Decarbonizing the post harvesting phase of the agri-food chain
Session 3: Circular economy solutions/innovations in water and energy management for the agri-food chain
Session 4: Nature based solutions to integrate energy and water aspects into the agri-food chain
Session 5: Making Water-Energy- Food integrated policies work for food security and the climate
Session 6: Replicating and upscaling innovative solutions for securing clean energy and water access for the agri-food chain
Session five in particular will focus on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus and feature Margaret Koli as a speaker. In light of the outcomes of the workshop in Nigeria and the initiation of the WEFS nexus online platform, the session calls upon experts to address the questions below related to learning from what works and where we are regarding policy and governance solutions aimed at promoting renewable energy and smart water use in the agri-food chain and socio-economic benefits of such solutions by discussing case studies, examples and their work experience:

What policy and governance solutions are available/used to help accelerate the scaling up of renewable energy and smart water use in the agri-food chain?
How these solutions benefit the agri-food chain, particularly in rural areas?
What can Parties and non-Party stakeholders learn from these policy options and governance frameworks, including the enablers and challenges/barriers, to result in emission reductions and sustainable development co-benefits?

Penn State University African Studies Program 7th Annual Conference
2019-04-17 - 2019-04-18 | Pennsylvania State University
“Africa on the Rise! 60 years after 1960”
The African Studies Program at The Pennsylvania State University, 7th annual conference, on April 17th-18th, 2020, titled “Africa on the Rise! 60 years after 1960,” commemorates the “Year of Africa.” 1960 significantly cascades the independence of African nations, as no less than 17 countries gained their freedom from colonial rule in that year alone. Significantly, with the struggles for independence and decolonization, new nation states became mired in internal ethnic clashes, racial discrimination, dictatorships and kleptocracy, foreign interventions, exploitation of natural resources, and urban and rural environmental issues, to name some of the challenges. On the other hand, and more so in the last 20 years, there has been significant growth of African economies. We see leapfrogging of technologies (i.e. cell phones, internet, e-commerce); resurgences and entirely new creative cultural forms particularly in the arts (literature, music, visual, performance, and digital media); women at the forefront in public leadership roles; and, an activation of a politically minded Pan-African youth population ready to change the future. This conference aims to trace the development of Africa since 1960 through formulations such as Global Africa and Theories of the Global South. It aims to bring together humanities and social science scholarship to critically review issues with regards to the decolonization of Africa, Pan-Africanism, the self-reliance of national economies, nation-building experiments, postcolonial challenges, creative arts and new technologies, and the future development of the continent.

For further inquiries, please email psuafr@gmail.com.
REGISTRATION FOR THE CONFERENCE IS FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
