Belmont Forum Approves Qatar’s Research Proposal

The proposal titled “Formulating Sustainable Urban Food, Water and Energy (FEW) strategy by optimising the synergetic effects among food, water and energy sectors” that was submitted by a Qatari team to Belmont Forum for this year has been approved.

The research work titled “Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative: Food-Water-Energy Nexus” (SUGI FEW Nexus) will be funded by Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), said a release.

The research team comprising the Ministry of Municipality and Environment led by H E Dr. Mohammed in Saif Al Kuwari (pictured), Director of Center for Environment and Municipal Studies.

The Qatar team is involved with European and American scientific research universities, Centres, and Institutes such as: the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH , the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), the University of West England in Bristol (UWE), Bristol Water plc (Bristol Water)  and the ROC-Connect in the United States. 

The Qatar team will also work with universities, national institutions, and specialised research centres to carry out this important scientific research to serve Qatar Vision 2030 and the National Development Strategy 2017-2022 and achieve the sustainable strategy for food, water and energy resources in Qatar.

The Belmont Forum is a group of the world’s major and emerging funders of global environmental change research. It aims to accelerate delivery of the environmental research needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources.

A total of 88 proposals were successfully submitted in the first evaluation phase and from these a total of 40 proposals were invited for the full proposal stage. In November 2017 these proposals were assessed by an expert panel. 

The steering committee of SUGI- Food-Water-Energy Nexus has selected SUNEX (Sustainable Urban FWE Nexus) project among the successful projects and decided to award a grant for it. SUNEX is one of 15 successful projects chosen from a total of 39 projects received by the committee.

The SUNEX project establishes an integrated modelling framework of advanced tools to model and assess the FWE systems’ demand and supply sides and captures their inter-dependencies through a nexus view that endorses sustainable and efficient solutions for energy, water and food supply for urban regions - of city and surrounding peri-urban areas. The FWE-Nexus concept will serve as central approach to ensure coherent solutions on sustainable use and management.