FUSE (Food-water-energy for Urban Sustainable Environments) is a transdisciplinary 3-year research project (2018-2021) involving the Food-Water-Energy Nexus (FWE) in Pune (India). The project will develop a long-term systems model that can be used to identify viable paths to sustainability. It brings together scientists, engineers, economists, and stakeholder engagement experts from Stanford University in California, USA, IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) in Laxenburg, Austria, UFZ (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research) in Leipzig, Germany, and ÖFSE (Austrian Foundation for Development Research) in Vienna, Austria. The project is a not-for-profit research effort and is part of the Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative of JPI Urban Europe and the Belmont Forum. Each of the national teams is supported individually by its own national science funding agency.

To integrate knowledge, expertise and views of local actors, FUSE adopts a Sustainability Living Lab (SLL) approach. The SLL approach includes a stakeholder analysis and two series of workshops, at the beginning and the end of the project period, respectively. In the first set of workshops (spring 2019), stakeholders and policy experts shared visions, challenges, coping strategies, and potential policy solutions. Based on the results of the workshops, interviews and surveys are carried out to further deepen the findings. The information gathered is then processed and integrated into the system model. In a second set of workshops (end of 2020), the results of the modelling exercise will be presented to the participants of the first workshops, and feedback will be elicited. Between the two series of workshop, further exchange with the stakeholders takes place.

This report documents the first series of workshops in Pune (India) in February 2019.