Engineering software tools for capturing the complexity of the water-energy-food nexus: lessons from the MAGIC project

The MAGIC project (Moving toward Adaptive Governance In Complexity, funded by EU-Horizon 2020 programme) features a perspective rooted in bioeconomics toward the accounting of technical and environmental resources required to ensure the living standards of EU societies. It aims at suitably tackling the nexus of energy, food and water to assess sustainability as a complex predicate. A software toolkit has to be developed as a key enabling technology to inform and steer the processes toward forthcoming UE policies; the toolkit is part of a Nexus Information System, aimed at supplying quantitative views of novel narratives about the various themes related to the nexus — water, energy, food along with labour and land use entanglement, opportunities and scenarios for innovations — by means of a rigorous and transparent approach to official data, domain knowledge and agreed models. The system is envisioned to be exploited in a Nexus information space, where analysts, policy makers and stakeholders with different backgrounds, interests and perspectives could interact and iterate on suitable datasets and semantically relevant models toward the decision-making process of future EU common policies. The challenges to be faced by NIS developers are twofold: to model the socio-ecological system (human society integrated in the environment) that behaves as a self-reproducing adaptive system, and to capture the sets of relationships expressing the nexus, a complex predicament in itself, which are relevant for the actors in the Nexus information space.