Energy, ecology and environment: a nexus perspective


E D I T O R I A L

Energy, ecology and environment: a nexus perspective

Bin Chen1

1
State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University,

Beijing 100875, People’s Republic of China

Published online: 26 February 2016

� Joint Center on Global Change and Earth System Science of the University of Maryland and Beijing Normal University and Springer-Verlag
Berlin Heidelberg 2016

The rising concern about a potential global energy crisis

and its impact on the economy and environment calls for a

transition from the current development paradigms to a

sustainable one. Such transition poses a significant chal-

lenge for scientists, industries and governments requiring

innovative policies to save energy and reduce environ-

mental and social impacts considerably. Moreover, the

transition towards a low-carbon future needs to be cog-

nizant of the social, cultural and institutional as well as the

biophysical and geographical context within which it takes

place and also in synergies provided by ecosystem services

and technological regimes developing nature-inspired

production and consumption systems. There is already

plenty of literature on these problems, along with an

abundance of journals with disciplinary territories and

sharp boundaries on the intellectual landscape. However,

we need a problem-oriented forum, transcending disci-

plinary boundaries, for putting the pieces together for

promoting informed discussions of an integrated vision of a

sustainable world.

The energy, ecology and environment (E3) issues,

which are highly interwoven in the networks of human and

natural systems, have been mostly disassembled into three

separate aspects from a reductionist way of thinking,

despite the trans-disciplinarity inherent in fundamental and

applied research (Dincer and Rosen 2007; Jørgensen and

Fath 2011; Sciubba and Zullo 2011; Chen 2014; Jørgensen

et al. 2015). Efforts in one discipline without considering

wider links and consequences often prove to be invalid

when promoting sustainability. For example, the increased

use of energy may lead to potential environmental pollu-

tion and ecosystem degradation. Such trade-offs need

linkage analyses and balanced solutions in an integrated

way. Also, since national, regional and local systems are

deeply embedded in globalized networks, distributed pro-

duction activities have become key drivers behind global

change imposing stress on ecosystems across spatial scale

due to spatial linkages between local activities and remote

impacts (Hubacek et al. 2014). Different from the previous

integrated thinking, nexus is a useful metaphor to investi-

gate mutual dependency of multiple elements in terms of

coupled mechanism being interlinked and conversion pro-

cesses embedded in intertwined disciplinary chains at

multiple scales. As shown in Fig. 1, the E3 nexus, re-

assembling both the interwoven connections and telecon-

nections, is thus recommended as a new paradigm for

tackling and resolving ‘‘wicked problems’’ (Chen 2015;

Fig. 1 Nexus of energy, ecology and environment
& Bin Chen

chenb@bnu.edu.cn

123

Energ. Ecol. Environ. (2016) 1(1):1–2

DOI 10.1007/s40974-016-0017-8

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s40974-016-0017-8&domain=pdf
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s40974-016-0017-8&domain=pdf


Chen and Chen 2015). Actually, the nexus approach has

gained momentum over the past decade and is expected to

uncover more information on the broadening issues of

climate change, energy and food security, socio-economic

growth and resource management and avoid unintended

and indirect consequences (Chen and Lu 2015; Costanza

and Kubiszewski 2015; Yang and Chen 2016).

The list of problems that mankind is facing is very long,

and all the problems are interrelated and cannot be solved

separately and by one approach, but require an integrated

approach based on the application of intra- and cross-dis-

ciplinary solutions. No single discipline has the capacity to

cope with these kinds of complex issues that require the

implications of different aspects of the sustainable devel-

opment of the world. A surge of interests has thus led us to

integrate the main disciplines as our development strategy

in order to adapt our future to the irreversible changes

inherent in the human civilization. The newly launched

journal, Energy, Ecology & Environment (E3), focuses on

approaches that integrate considerations of energy, ecology

and environment and uses this cross-disciplinary integra-

tion to be an important counterbalance towards the very

dominating economic approach. Despite the growing con-

cern on E3 nexus, there are still many obstacles to devel-

oping the tools and approaches at different scales. This

journal may provide a cross-discipline forum to establish

close links among these interrelated areas of investigation,

set up systems science based on knowledge from other

sciences and promote multidisciplinary solutions to tackle

complex socio-economic and environmental problems.

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	Energy, ecology and environment: a nexus perspective
	References