Facilitating the next generation of effective and intelligent water-related policies utilising artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning to assess the water-energy-food-ecosystem (WEFE) nexus

Water, energy, food, and ecosystems (the WEFE nexus) are interconnected and are influenced by climatic and socio-economic drivers. Resource constraints and the general lack of consideration by policies of various interconnections could hamper economic development and resource security itself, as well as affect actor behaviour and policy formulation initiatives.

NEXOGENESIS is a 4-year European collaborative project financed by the European Commission under the H2020 programme. It gathers 20 partners from Europe and South Africa focusing on facilitating the next generation of effective and intelligent water-related policies using artificial intelligence and machine learning to assess policy impacts on the WEFE nexus to suggest new ways to design better, more harmonious policy.

NEXOGENESIS will develop and validate 3 solutions:

• A cross-sectoral policy-making framework developed for and validated by stakeholders;
• A Self-Learning Nexus Assessment Engine taking different aspects into account and exploring the consequences of possible policy options;
• A WEFE Nexus Footprint to track impacts of policy objectives and communicate results in a more digestible way.