07 August 2018 - 29 August 2018
Pune, India

FUSE: Food-water-energy for Urban Sustainable Environments, a first visit

FUSE aims to develop a long-term water-food-energy-social systems model to support the sustainable growth of rapidly growing urban environments.

© Lalam | Shutterstock

© Lalam | Shutterstock

This is a first visit to Pune to begin determining and establishing connections with relevant stakeholders and institutes, including government, academic, industry, and NGO partners. Mikhail Smilovic is a research scholar in the water program at IIASA and along with a PhD student from Stanford University will be in Pune August 7-26, 2018.

Applied to the Pune region in India, the team will construct the systems model to capture connections and feedbacks among users, producers, distribution mechanisms, resources, and the environment. Under narratives of future changes in climate, demographics, land use, and economic development, and considering the behaviour of a wide range of actors, we will develop and evaluate policy interventions and innovative governance forms to identify implementable sustainability options.

The project is a gorgeous collaboration of social and physical understandings, integrating dynamic social systems and decision making with physical and modeling sciences. The motivation is to support the sustainable growth of the rapidly growing city of Pune in India, with narratives built by stakeholders intimately involved in all aspects of Pune’s development. The role of the project is to understand what pathways may achieve such stakeholder-driven narratives of developmenmt, and which pathways may hinder the achievements of such narratives. For example, can agriculture maintain its current water consumption without being in competition with the growing energy and water demands of the expanding urban environment?

Including IIASA, the institutes involved are Stanford University, the Austrian Foundation for Development Research, and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany.


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Last edited: 03 August 2018

CONTACT DETAILS

Mikhail Smilovic

Research Scholar Water Security Research Group - Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313