Project
MAGIC - Moving towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity: informing nexus security
The goal of the MAGIC project is to help EU policy makers and other stakeholders to assess the feasibility, viability, and desirability of multiple interacting policies, and to identify where those policies may need adjustment in order to secure the goals of the Europe 2020 strategy.
Food security, energy security and water security compete for the usage of the same set of resources. The ongoing established practice is to develop quantitative analyses of the balance between demand and supply of energy, food and water, that consider these resource flows one at the time. MAGIC focuses on key components of the sustainability strategy - water, food, energy, and land use - identifying how they are interconnected in a Nexus.
MAGIC is intended to contribute to a successful implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. The innovative approach to address complex policy issues is focused on the generation and testing of narratives about the current Nexus situation in Europe. It identifies crucial factors that have to be specified in order to check the feasibility, viability, and desirability of policies at multiple aggregation levels and spacial scales (EU and individual countries).
Project aims
The goal of MAGIC is to provide an integrative analysis by transforming the Nexus into a family of relationships between numerous clearly identified factors, and then exploring this complex web of relationships in a systematic way which includes societal challenges and stakeholder perceptions.
MAGIC will deliver an analytical framework and illustrative applications. These will be useful in detecting key characteristics of the sustainability of socio-ecological systems (using a social metabolic approach), and in checking the coherence of the quantitative information needed to describe them across scales and dimensions.
The adoption of MAGIC's approach will improve the quality, flexibility and timeliness of the information available. It will help EU policymakers and other stakeholders to assess the feasibility, viability and desirability of multiple interacting policies, and to identify where those policies may need adjustment in order to secure the goals of the Europe 2020 strategy.