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Water challenges rarely sit within one sector. Decisions on water allocation, infrastructure, agriculture, energy production, ecosystem protection, or public health interact—sometimes creating unintended impacts. The WEFE+H Nexus (Water–Energy–Food–Ecosystems–Health) offers a practical lens to understand these interdependencies, anticipate trade-offs, and identify solutions that deliver co-benefits across sectors. Rather than treating water management as an isolated technical issue, the Nexus approach recognises that actions in one domain inevitably influence the others, especially under climate change, resource scarcity, and rising expectations for sustainability and resilience.
This section first clarifies what the WEFE+H Nexus means, why it is increasingly necessary, and how it connects to global and EU policy agendas. It also highlights the main obstacles that often prevent integrated approaches from taking root, such as fragmented mandates, limited coordination across levels and sectors, data and interoperability gaps, and misaligned incentives that make trade-offs hard to manage in practice.
It then turns to implementation at the basin scale, using droughts, floods, and water scarcity as practical “stress tests” for cross-sector governance. The focus is on what helps territories move from the Nexus concept to action: risk assessment and early warning, integrated planning, demand and supply measures, nature-based solutions, and the enabling conditions that make these approaches feasible over time—policy coherence, institutional coordination, and the use of financial and digital tools to support transparent and adaptive decision-making.