Water, Energy and Food Security

Phillip Hall, an adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia, addressed the interconnected challenges of water, energy, and food security through a cybernetic framework. He traced the water-energy-food nexus concept to the 2011 Bonn conference and proposed redefining sustainable development as an ongoing process of institutional change rather than a fixed end state.

Hall presented a dynamic macroeconomic model depicting three overlapping spheres of resource management and explicitly applied Wiener's cybernetic concepts of feedback, causality, and stabilization to the analysis. His approach demonstrated how cybernetic thinking can illuminate the complex interdependencies among natural resource systems and provide practical guidance for policy interventions that account for the systemic nature of sustainability challenges.