Serious gaming to explore the water-energy-food-land-climate nexus with multi-stakeholder participation: The sim4nexus approach

Water, energy, food, land and climate form a tightly connected nexus in which actions on one sector impact other sectors creating feedbacks and unanticipated consequences. This is especially because at present much scientific research and policies are constrained into single discipline/sector silos often not interacting (e.g. water-related research/policy). However experimenting in interaction and determining how a change in one sector could impact another may take unreasonable time frames, be very difficult in practice, and may be potentially dangerous, triggering any one of a number of unanticipated side-effects. Current modelling often neglects knowledge from practice. Therefore a safe environment is required to test the potential cross-sectoral implications of policy decisions in one sector on other sectors. Serious games offer such an environment by creating realistic -simulations', where long-Term impacts of policies may be tested and rated. This paper describes how the ongoing (2016-2020) Horizon2020 project SIM4NEXUS develops cloud based serious games investigating potential plausible cross-nexus implications and synergies due to policy interventions for 12 multi-scale case studies ranging from regional to global. Integrating modelling and policies, as well as learning from playing a serious game is justified by adopting a proof-of-concept for a specific regional case study in Sardinia (Italy).