The Maiden EPIC Talks: Integrated CLEWs Research for Sustainable Development in Africa

On 9 December 2024, the EPIC Africa Research Network (EARN) held the maiden edition of EPIC Talks, its flagship series created to connect research with real-world impact across Africa. I moderated the session, which took place online on Zoom.

The session

The first webinar was held under the theme "Fostering Collaborative Solutions for Sustainable Development: Driving Impact through Integrated CLEWs Research in Africa". It examined how integrated research on Climate, Land, Energy and Water systems (CLEWs) can help address Africa's development challenges, covering policy, modelling tools and case studies from Ghana and Kenya.

The session was hosted by Prof. Ing. Eric Ofosu Antwi, with three guest speakers:

• Dr. Alunda Bernard Ouma;
• Prof. Ing. David Ato Quansah; and
• Shreyas Gopal Savanur.

As moderator, my role was to guide the conversation between the speakers and the audience and to keep the discussion focused on how integrated, cross-sector evidence can move from research into planning and policy.

Why CLEWs matters to my work

Much of my work sits at the intersection of water, energy and food. These systems are closely linked: decisions on hydropower affect irrigation and water supply, land use shapes energy demand and water availability, and climate change acts on all of them at once. Planning each sector in isolation risks policies that work against one another.

The CLEWs approach, in which I trained through the EPIC Africa Summer School on CLEWs-based Water-Energy-Food Modelling, offers a structured way to model these interactions and to test policy options across sectors before they are implemented. A regular forum such as EPIC Talks, where researchers and practitioners share tools and country experience, helps bring that kind of integrated analysis to the people who make decisions.

Acknowledgements

I thank the EPIC Africa Research Network for launching EPIC Talks, Prof. Ing. Eric Ofosu Antwi for hosting, and Dr. Alunda Bernard Ouma, Prof. Ing. David Ato Quansah and Shreyas Gopal Savanur for their contributions to the maiden session.

Image: EPIC Africa Research Network.