News

04 December 2020
MAGIC launches Uncomfortable Knowledge Hub
MAGIC proudly launches its Uncomfortable Knowledge Hub (UKH), a legacy of more than four years of interdisciplinary environmental and social research into the water-energy-food-environment (WEFE) nexus. A key experience of the MAGIC project was that many WEFE Nexus issues, in policy domains such as the common agricultural policy, energy...

30 November 2020
Labor embodied in imports seen to majorly boost the EU's standard of living
In a new article published in the journal 'Ecological Economics', MAGIC researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona take a close look at the virtual labour hours embodied in the goods and services traded by the EU, USA and China. Human labor is a crucial yet often overlooked biophyscial limit to sustainable growth. While in...

19 November 2020
Why does the European Union produce biofuels?
A new article by MAGIC researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona takes a critical look at the narratives around biofuels production in the European Union. The authors seek to clarify the confusion created by the simultaneous use of non-equivalent policy discourses and address the inconsistency between long-term goals and...

12 October 2020
EU food security and environmental health heavily depend on agricultural imports
A new article of researchers from the MAGIC consortium and the European Environment Agency published today in the journal 'Ecosystem Services' points at the dependence of EU food and environmental security on imports of agricultural commodities. In the EU, national-scope efforts to protect local ecosystem services are greatly helped by the current...

30 September 2020
Uncomfortable Knowledge in WEF Nexus Governance: Results from MAGIC
MAGIC Final Policy Event | 30 September 2020 | 16:00 – 17:30 CEST | online | The issues of water, energy and food (WEF) security are deeply entangled into each other. The WEF Nexus needs to be understood and governed as a complex system in order to overcome silos in scientific and political institutions. MAGIC is coming to a close after...

23 September 2020
The Nexus Times Book is out!
The MAGIC consortium proudly released its book: The Nexus Times! This book is an attempt at providing glimpses of Nexus issues in an accessible form for a general audience. It consists of short and sometimes very short articles that originally were published in our on-line newsletter with the same title. A range of topics related to...

22 September 2020
PNS5: Post-Normal Science in Practice
PNS5 special MAGIC session | 22 September 2020 | 15:00 – 16:30 CEST | online | Don't miss out on MAGIC's final scientific event: 'Post-Normal Science in Practice: Lessons Learned from the MAGIC project'. It takes the form of a (virtual) special session at the 2020 Post-Normal Science Symposium (PNS5). The session consists of a...

20 September 2020
Nexus Times September issue dedicated to Post-Normal MAGIC
September 2020 marks the end of the MAGIC project and sees the celebration of the Fifth Post-Normal Science Conference. In line with these events, the last issue of our newsletter The Nexus Times is devoted to the overarching question: “What is the contribution of MAGIC to Post-Normal Science?" In this issue, project members reflect on the...

14 September 2020
MAGIC Nexus Game released
The European Union needs to secure its future food and energy supply while keeping environmental impacts within safe boundaries: reduce carbon emissions while staying within the sustainable limits to land and water use. Reconciling the policy targets on food and energy security, sustainable and efficient resource use, and climate adaptation is a...

25 August 2020
Co-Production of Narratives on Local Nexus Governance to Enhance Adaptive Capacity
MAGIC researcher Violeta Cabello shared conceptual and empirical insights from the transdisciplinary science-for-governance approach developed within MAGIC at the ECPR General Conference in the panel "Adaptive Governance in Aquatic Social-Ecological Systems" (25 August 2020, virtual event). She explained the operationalization of the Quantitative...