International Conference LINKS 2015 Linkages between energy, food and water consumption for Brazil in the context of climate change mitigation strategies Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 22nd to 24th September 2015

International Conference LINKS 2015

Linkages between energy, food and water consumption for Brazil in the context of climate change mitigation strategies

Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 22nd to 24th September 2015

The efficiency of resource use is a crucial determinant for the future quality of the environment both at the local and global scales. Business-as-usual pathways of economic, demographic and resource use development are known to greatly exceed tolerable limits of global environmental change (e.g. with global mean temperature increases exceeding 5°C). Such pathways likely involve exceeding other environmental boundaries such as water, land use and nutrient use limits, with potentially disastrous impacts on human societies and ecosystems in many areas. These issues are of particular relevance in Brazil, which may suffer significant amounts of environmental change, biodiversity loss and possible desertification in certain areas.

Analysing sustainable development in Brazil demands a study of complex interactions between energy, food and water systems, ideally conducted with coupled computational models that operate both at the global (i.e. climate change) and local (i.e. land use) scales. Meanwhile, the likelihood of success of implementation of sustainable development policies in Brazil depends on how these are developed and how well they fit within their political, governmental and legal context. 

LINKS 2015 aims to bring together an appropriate combination of these necessary elements in order to devise a longer-term research programme: joining an established state-of-the-art computational (human and software) research capacity and knowhow of international standard for analysing energy-economy-environment interactions which can be diffused across the LINKS 2015 consortium, and a UK-Brazil team of researchers involved in local policy, law and governance analysis that provides relevance to feasible policy-making in order to tackling environmental challenges in Brazil.