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In the south basin of Lake Biwa, Shiga, Japan, overgrown aquatic weeds (submerged macrophytes) impede cruising boats and cause unpleasant odors and undesirable waste when washed ashore. To address this socio-ecological problem, Shiga Prefectural Government implemented a public program to remove overgrown weeds and compost them ashore to conserve the lake environment, while coastal inhabitants and occasional volunteers remove weeds from the beaches to maintain the quality of the living environment. However, these effects are limited because of disjointed social networks. We applied an adaptive and abductive approach to develop community capability to jointly address this problem by sharing academic knowledge with local actors and empowering them. The initial multifaceted reviews, including interviews and postal questionnaire surveys, revealed that the agro-economic value of composted weeds declined in historical and socio-psychological contexts and that most of the unengaged public relied on local governments to address environmental problems. These findings were synthesized and assessed with workshop participants, including local inhabitants, governmental agents, businesspeople, social entrepreneurs, and research experts, to unearth the best solution. The workshops resulted in the development of an e-point system, called Biwa Point, to promote and acknowledge voluntary environmental conservation activities, including beach cleaning. It may contribute to enhancing the socio-ecological capability of communities. Additionally, ethical issues, such as publication of inconvenient truths, undesired interpretation by the researchers, and social constraints in research methods, arose through our research practice. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42532-021-00078-3.

A review was conducted to understand the current status of the water–energy–food nexus, focusing on its methodology, and the process through which the nexus approach has academically and geographically expanded across and synthesized more than one discourse, discipline, and domain via its methodology as interdisciplinary and integrated approaches. The review article types were categorized into five groups and comprehensively analyzed. Various indicators to assess the nexus methods and tools, reported in previous studies, that can be used to select appropriate methods and tools for methodology and research designs. The studies in the reviewed articles were characterized by various stages of interdisciplinary research. In addition, the water–energy–food nexus initiatives, which generalize methods and tools, applying mixed methods to the replicability of specific case studies, were discussed based on the findings.

This study has developed a methodology for the nexus approach by integrating interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary concepts and qualitative and quantitative mixed methods into the process of the systems thinking approach. The nexus approach was institutionalized in two projects using the location specific case study of Beppu, Japan where a set of interconnected issues in using geothermal hot spring resources have emerged due to the promotion of geothermal energy development under low-carbon policies at global and national levels. The interlinkages among geothermal hot spring resources, including heat, steam, nutrients, and drainage between land and coastal systems were analyzed to improve decision- and policy-making. This study discusses (1) how different discipline-oriented methods and data are integrated, (2) how much of the targeted water-energy-food nexus systems are understood using the nexus approach, and (3) how far does the nexus approach influence changes in the policy agenda and human behavior regarding sustainable geothermal hot spring resources use. The nexus approach facilitated the sequential integration of individual methods and data to better explain the causal linkages focusing on water-energy-food resources in the human-nature systems in Beppu. The proposed policy recommendations are based on the local government initiative for continuing to conduct citizen participatory surveys on geothermal hot spring resources. Transferring the developed methodology will help to effectively develop geothermal hot spring resources and compliment the current national renewable energy and natural resource policies and management.

In the south basin of Lake Biwa, Shiga, Japan, overgrown aquatic weeds (submerged macrophytes) impede cruising boats, and cause unpleasant odors and undesirable waste when washed ashore. To address this socio-ecological problem, Shiga Prefectural Government implemented a public program to remove overgrown weeds and compost them ashore to conserve the lake environment, while coastal inhabitants and occasional volunteers remove weeds from the beaches to maintain the quality of the living environment. However, these effects are limited because of the disjointed social networks. We evaluate an adaptive and abductive approach to develop community capability to jointly address this problem by sharing the academic knowledge with local actors and empowering them to adopt initiatives. The initial multifaceted academic reviews, including interviews and postal questionnaire surveys revealed that the agro-economic value of composted weeds declined in historical and socio-psychological contexts and that most of the unengaged public relied on local governments to address environmental problems. These findings were synthesized and assessed with workshop participants, including local inhabitants, governmental agents, businesspeople, social entrepreneurs, and research experts, to unearth the best solution. The workshops resulted in the development of an e-point system, called Biwa Point , to promote and acknowledge voluntary environmental conservation activities, including beach cleaning. It may contribute to enhancing the socio-ecological capability of communities. Additionally, ethical issues, such as publication of inconvenient truths or undesired interpretation by the researchers as well as social constraints in research methods, arose through our research practice.

This paper discusses how open science can be interlinked with community-based participatory research (CBPR) to address socio-environmental issues. By reviewing three case studies in Japan, the authors developed a theoretical framework to span these inter-actor boundaries by (1) discovering and sharing goals that actors with different interests could tackle together (the transcend method); (2) considering ethical equity with special attention to empowering marginalized (or ‘small voice’) actors; (3) developing fair data visualization based on the FAIR Data Principles and (4) facilitating dialogue. A civic tech approach, in which civic engineers develop a solution to local issues by using open governmental data and information and communication technologies, is applied. This framework will reflectively be tested using case studies.

In this paper, we present the emerging practices in Japanese local municipalities, in which participatory methods are applied to envision sustainable future and relevant target settings. We selected three local cases: Higashiomi city, Kizugawa city and Nagakute city as emerging initiatives. A comparative analysis was carried out to identify commonalities and differences, and to derive lessons for appropriate governance and systems for participatory deliberation in future visioning. We argue that the deliberation processes served as a platform for effective communication, and that installing a mechanism that allows reflexive deliberation processes is the key to make participatory methods fully functional.

The objective of this study is to describe a target water&ndash, energy&ndash, food (WEF) nexus domain world including causal linkages and trade-off relationships between WEF resources and their stakeholders, and to develop a WEF nexus system map as an interdisciplinary tool used for understanding the subsequent complexity of WEF nexus systems. An ontology engineering method, which is a qualitative method, was applied for the replicability of the WEF nexus domain ontology and the map, because ontology engineering is a method of semantic web development for enhancing the compatibility of qualitative descriptions logically or objectively. The WEF nexus system map has three underlying concepts: (1) systems thinking, (2) holistic thinking, and (3) an integrated approach at an operational level, according to the hypothesis that the chains of changes in linkages between water, energy, and food resources holistically and systemically affect the WEF nexus system, including natural and social systems, both temporally and spatially. This study is significant because it allows us to (1) develop the WEF nexus domain ontology database, including defining the concepts and sub-concepts of trade-offs relating to WEF for the replicability of this study, (2) integrate the qualitative ontology method and quantitative network analysis method to identify key concepts serving as linkage hubs in the WEF nexus domain ontology, and (3) visualize human&ndash, nature interactions such as linkages between water, energy, and food resources and their stakeholders in social and natural systems. This paper also discusses future challenges in the application of the map for a science&ndash, policy&ndash, society interface.

This article discusses an assessment of the collaboration process of interdisciplinary research on the water-energy-food nexus by combining a text mining approach and an ontology engineering approach. For this purpose we first overview a collaboration experiment designed for research development. Second, we identify researchers’ concerns in the discussion context of this experiment and represent the communication process focusing on keyword usage. Third, we show the relationships between the researchers’ domains and the fixed research issue and its basic direction by means of ontology engineering. Finally, we discuss how the shared concepts among researchers are dealt with in the collaboration process by combining the represented communication process as an assessment of collaboration.

This chapter summarizes the activities of the interdisciplinary study group under the RIHN Nexus project. The mission of the group was (1) to review the WEF Nexus studies as a means to understand the current state of research on the WEF, (2) to develop integrated methods to address nexus issues, and (3) to design and visualize a WEF nexus system map to understand the complexity of the WEF Nexus system. The future challenges of the interdisciplinary group are (a) to develop the concept of integration in order to understand the concept of WEF nexus, (b) to integrate each method for adopting inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches to address nexus issues, (c) to approach not only disciplines, but also sectors using integrated methods focusing on stakeholders to adopt a transdisciplinary approach.

This paper focuses on a collection of methods that can be used to analyze the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus. We classify these methods as qualitative or quantitative for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches. The methods for interdisciplinary research approaches can be used to unify a collection of related variables, visualize the research problem, evaluate the issue, and simulate the system of interest. Qualitative methods are generally used to describe the nexus in the region of interest, and include primary research methods such as Questionnaire Surveys, as well as secondary research methods such as Ontology Engineering and Integrated Maps. Quantitative methods for examining the nexus include Physical Models, Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA), Integrated Indices, and Optimization Management Models. The authors discuss each of these methods in the following sections, along with accompanying case studies from research sites in Japan and the Philippines. Although the case studies are specific to two regions, these methods could be applicable to other areas, with appropriate calibration.

The search for more actionable knowledge lies at the core of Sustainability Science and its implicit desire to improve the lives of various stakeholders without disrupting the balance of Nature and efficient use of all available resources. In this chapter, the authors have examined current shortfalls in knowledge-centric research and proposed the creation of an Ontology-based open-source tool to create a more practical approach for researchers to facilitate both thought and decision-making process in order to solve pressing issues with place-based actions. The effectiveness of the Hozo Tool is then examined and validated using four case studies in an attempt to both refine the current models and propose the necessary steps to create a more holistic knowledge ecosystem – one that might ultimately facilitate broader collaboration worldwide.

Implementation of the sustainability science (SS) approach is often difficult because of poor communication between experts from different academic fields. We focused on ontology engineering as a method of knowledge structuring that supports the co-deliberation process. However, SS is too broad for a few experts to construct an ontology because SS targets and covers almost all existing research fields from the viewpoint of problem-solving. The N-iteration process is required for completing an SS ontology. In the present paper, we discuss the initial design process for constructing an ontology on SS from the aspect of a knowledge-sharing tool to support co-deliberation. First, we identified the SS ontology by referring to the existing literature. Second, we traced the structuring process of the SS ontology, which is independent of the existing research domain. Third, we compared the SS ontology with existing ontologies or concept structures on SS. Fourth, we assessed the SS ontology produced in the initial process in terms of relevance and coverage and addressed areas for improvement in order to facilitate co-deliberation among researchers from different domains. As a result of developing the SS ontology and applying it to the mapping tool that we developed based on the ontology, we found the following three points: the SS ontology enables us to define concepts relevant to SS without overlapping by distinguishing part-of and attribute-of relationships at the upper level of the ontology; the SS-based mapping tool successfully represents the potential countermeasures required by the targeted problem for all scientific fields except experimental engineering; however, the SS ontology requires further improvement in order to represent the conceptual linkage arising from compound and secondary problems and the fulfillment of classes at the lower hierarchy of Shortage problem, and requires slots for the entire hierarchy. In addition, based on the discussion of the areas for improvement, we found that missing slots and classes should be added in the process in which we use or improve tools corresponding to a variety of requirements for supporting co-deliberation. In this way, we are able to propose an incremental process for constructing the SS ontology from the aspect of a knowledge-sharing tool to support co-deliberation.

In Sustainability Science (SS) it is not only difficult to identify what needs to be solved but how to solve the problems once identified. There has been no consensus on underlying question of “What is structuring in SS?” This paper focuses on articulating in the form of a reference model a set of required elements, functions, and actions for structuring SS knowledge and on realizing a part of that reference model by developing a prototype knowledge system for mapping relevant concepts and their linkages in SS. First, we develop a reference model composed of five layers. Second, we develop an ontology-based mapping tool as a tentative solution at Layer 2 of the reference model. Third, we assess whether the developed tool is compliant with the reference model for SS. This study concluded that the developed tool can facilitate divergent exploration, the function of Layer 2.

In sustainability science (SS), it is difficult to identify what needs to be solved, and it is also not clear how to solve the problems that are identified. There has been no consensus on the underlying question of “What is structuring knowledge in SS?” This paper focuses on knowledge structuring accompanied by supporting of thinking. It addresses the key challenges associated with knowledge structuring in SS, identifies the requirements for the structuring of knowledge, proposes a reference model, and develops an ontology-based mapping tool as a solution to one layer of the reference model. First, we identify the important requirements for SS knowledge structuring. Second, we develop a reference model composed of five layers based on three of the requirements. Third, we develop an ontology-based mapping tool at Layer 2 of the reference model for meeting the two major challenges for SS, namely, identifying what problems should be addressed in SS itself and proposing solutions for those problems. The tool is designed to store and retrieve information regarding SS, to provide access to a prototype ontology for SS, and to create multiple maps of conceptual chains depending on a user’s interests and perspectives. Finally, we assess whether the developed tool successfully realizes the targeted part of the reference model for SS by examining the tool’s conformity to the reference model, as well as its usability, effectiveness, and constraints. Although several issues were identified in the prototype ontology and the mapping tool, the study concluded that the mapping tool is useful enough to facilitate the function of Layer 2. In particular, the mapping tool can support thinking about SS from the viewpoint of: (a) finding new potentials and risks of technological countermeasures studied in SS; (b) helping users to get a more comprehensive picture of problems and their potential solutions; and (c) providing an effective opportunity to come up with new ideas that might not be thought of without such a tool.

Study region We do not target particular region, but we implement the workshop experiments towards the researcher groups in the laboratories. Study focus When we discuss hydrology in the context of water–energy–food nexus, the discussion will inevitably include interdisciplinary contents. For example, in the impact assessment of groundwater use we need understanding whole mechanisms composed of all kinds of causal linkages from the groundwater concept or the groundwater issues. In this article we focus on ontology engineering, which is one of the base technologies in Semantic Web technology, as a method providing common terms, concepts, and semantics. New hydrological insights We discuss the effectiveness of ontology engineering approach in the process of collaborative research, and propose the way of ontology use contributing to interdisciplinary research through the experimental workshops of research development. The introduction of ontology engineering approach will enable us to share a common language and a common theoretical basis. But the development of the new method based on ontology engineering is necessary. For example, knowledge structuring according to each perspective of researchers and simple figure accompanied with a reasoned argument in the background are the directions of tool development.