Trade-off

A situation in which gains in one sector’s objective, such as more irrigation for food, impose costs on another, such as less water for hydropower or ecosystems.

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Response option (nexus)

An intervention assessed for its effects across several nexus elements; the IPBES nexus assessment presents more than 70 such options with co-benefits across biodiversity, water, food, health and climate.

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Nexus assessment

An analysis of the interlinkages between water, energy and food (and often land, ecosystems and health) in a place, combining evidence, scenarios and the appraisal of response options with stakeholders (FAO, 2014).

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Water withdrawal

Water taken from surface or groundwater sources for use, whether or not it is returned; distinct from water consumption, the part that is not returned (for example through evaporation).

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Nexus interactions

In FAO’s framework, the ways resource systems interact: interdependencies (depending on each other), constraints (imposing conditions or trade-offs) and synergies (mutually reinforcing or sharing benefits).

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Water-energy-food nexus

The interdependencies between water, energy and food systems, and an approach that manages them together to increase efficiency, reduce trade-offs, build synergies and improve governance across sectors (Hoff, 2011).

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Interconnectedness

Linkages between components of a system through which distress in one component raises the likelihood of distress in others; one of three criteria for systemic importance with size and substitutability (FSB, IMF and BIS, 2009).

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Femtorisk

A seemingly small-scale event that can trigger consequences at a much higher level of organisation through complex chains of events (UNDRR GAR 2019, after Levin).

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Polycrisis

The causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects (Lawrence et al., 2024).

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Compound event

An event with significant impact produced by a combination of multiple climate drivers and/or hazards, such as heat and drought together, whose joint risk exceeds the sum of single-hazard estimates (Zscheischler et al., 2018).

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