How can academic research better help business?
How should companies meet the demands of a growing market for food, energy and water without damaging the integrity of the environment on which these services depend? And how should they take account of the additional complexity of climate change, inequality and population growth in their strategies?
The interaction between food, energy, water and environmental systems is just one example of a ‘nexus’ that companies are increasingly being expected to manage. The irrigation of crops, for example, can affect access to drinking water, the health of aquatic ecosystems, and hydroelectric power generation. It is simultaneously dependent on these factors, as well as others such as forest loss, watershed management, pollution, politics and the practices of other companies.
Yet the science of interdependency, particularly in a problem context such as a global commodity value chain, is in its infancy. Arriving at long-term solutions to nexus challenges is proving elusive: it is simply very complex. That said many companies, including those we are working with at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), are making serious strides to safeguard soil, water, biodiversity and carbon.
As a whole, however, the global business community has much further to go before being able to declare itself sustainable in any scientifically robust sense, and governments have a crucial role in unlocking ambition. Although the endpoint is clear, systems of production and consumption that can, literally, go on forever owing to their restorative influence on the environment, the solutions are multifaceted, location- and context-specific, and subject to significant uncertainty. In a world of limited budgets, what forms of research would empower companies to make most rapid progress?
Through the Nexus Network, a three-year ESRC funded collaboration between the University of Sheffield, University of Sussex, the University of East Anglia, the University of Exeter and CISL, CISL set up the Nexus2020 project to build a bridge between the business and academic worlds and identify the top 40 questions that, if answered, would best help companies to manage their food-energy-water-environment nexus dependencies and impacts.
This was the first time that these two communities have been brought together effectively to co-produce research priorities that underpin solutions to challenges such as managing competing uses of land, building resilient supply chains and sustaining livelihoods in resource-scarce parts of the world.
The questions identified by this group reveal the most pressing areas that academics and their counterparts in business can act on now. If they are studied in such a way that the companies are engaged fully as partners, shaping the research objectives, methods and timeframe, there is an opportunity to leverage the results at a globally significant scale through the reach and influence of the companies.
From a purely academic perspective there is a further significant opportunity: to build relationships, and hence trust, with companies with a view to conducting research in situ within their operations, that is placing the firm and its data at the heart of the experiment.
This is not the usual modus operandi of academics, some of whom may hold legitimate concerns that co-operation with business could compromise independence or resemble consultancy rather than fundamental research. With careful management, neither need be the case.
True co-production, or ‘transdisciplinarity’ as it is sometimes called, is beneficial to both parties. Companies need sound, multidisciplinary, long-term research engagement to address the dilemma of managing the food-energy-water-environment nexus while maintaining bottom line and competitive performance.
Academics need data-rich research environments in which to test hypotheses and uncover new knowledge and increasingly to demonstrate the value of their work to research funders.
This innovative way of working requires new skills and significant patience to make work in practice. But the prize is immense, which is why CISL has published the report Nexus 2020: The most important research questions for business sustainability and why it is placing co-design at the heart of its research strategy for the future.
