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The sustainable development goals (SDGs) challenge markets, regulators and practitioners to achieve multiple objectives on water, food and energy. This calls for responses that are coordinated and scaled appropriately. Learning from water-energy-food nexus could support much-needed building of links between the separate SDGs. The concept has highlighted how risks manifest when blinkered development and management of water, food and energy reduce resource security across sectors and far-reaching scales. However, three under-studied dimensions of these risks must be better considered in order to identify leverage points for sustainable development: first, externalities and shared risks across multiple scales; second, innovative government mechanisms for shared risks; and third, negotiating the balance between silos, politics and power in addressing shared risks.

PR, IFPRI3; ISI; E Building Resilience, EPTD, CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE)

The recent discourse on water security has emerged against a backdrop of increasing human demand for, and struggle over, scarce water resources across the globe (e.g. UN Development Programme, 2006; World Water Assessment Programme, 2009). The socio-economic dimensions of water scarcity and water security have been extensively documented (see for instance most of the other chapters in this book). In contrast, the consequences of water policy and management decisions for freshwater ecosystems, and the potential knock-on effects on society from changes to those ecosystems, have often either been implicit in academic and policy debates about water security or they have been overlooked. This is despite fact that dams, over-abstraction of water and other pressures have led to high-profile failures of freshwater ecosystems, such as the Murray-Darling River and the Aral Sea, with very substantial socio-economic and political impacts. In fact, rivers and wetlands are now among the most threatened of all ecosystems globally (Finlayson et al, 2005; Vörösmarty et al, 2010; WWF, 2012). More broadly, the magnified political and media profile of environmental sustainability issues, dating back to the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, suggests that sustainable management of natural resources requires specific attention to environmental, as well as socio-economic, concerns. Reasons for the lack of attention to freshwater ecosystems in the water security discourse include the historical gap in concepts and language, and perceived gaps in priorities, between those primarily concerned with conserving river, lake and wetland ecosystems and those whose job it has been to develop and manage water resources for human use. There are signs that these hitherto distinct specialisms are now converging, at least in some key aspects. Recognising the need to optimize multiple uses of freshwater ecosystems in a world of more than seven billion people, conservation NGOs such as WWF

This article reviews and contrasts two approaches that water security researchers employ to advance understanding of the complexity of water-society policy challenges. A prevailing reductionist approach seeks to represent uncertainty through calculable risk, links national GDP tightly to hydro-climatological causes, and underplays diversity and politics in society. When adopted uncritically, this approach limits policy-makers to interventions that may reproduce inequalities, and that are too rigid to deal with future changes in society and climate. A second, more integrative, approach is found to address a range of uncertainties, explicitly recognise diversity in society and the environment, incorporate water resources that are less-easily controlled, and consider adaptive approaches to move beyond conventional supply-side prescriptions. The resultant policy recommendations are diverse, inclusive, and more likely to reach the marginalised in society, though they often encounter policy-uptake obstacles. The article concludes by defining a route towards more effective water security research and policy, which stresses analysis that matches the state of knowledge possessed, an expanded research agenda, and explicitly addresses inequities.