Science for Sustainability: Using Societal Metabolism Analysis to check the robustness of European Union policy narratives in the water, energy and food nexus

This conference paper is an output of an ongoing EU Horizon 2020 project (MAGIC) that aims to better understand how EU water, food, energy, waste and biodiversity policies link with each other and with EU climate and sustainability goals, framed in terms of the nexus concept. The project conducts transdisciplinary research with policy makers using an approach termed Quantitative Story Telling (QST), as an interface between science and policy domains. QST combines semantic (qualitative) and formal (quantitative) approaches to assess the plausibility, normative fairness and analytical coherence of narratives being used by stakeholders to justify either the status quo or alternative policy positions for the EU. The paper focuses on those aspects of the MAGIC analysis highlighted by external reviewers of the project as being most insightful and having the most potential value to a wider community of practice concerned with supporting or evaluating sustainability related policies. The paper outlines the process of QST used and the quantitative method used, multi-scale societal metabolism analyses (SMA) assessing the funds of land and human time needed to create the flows of materials, energy and money that reproduce and maintain the identity of the system of interest.