Dr Dick Fenner and Dr Feriha Mukuve have been awarded the Senior Moulton Medal for 2015 by the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) for a paper on "Scale variability of water, land and energy resource interactions and their influence on the food system in Uganda " and published in the Journal of Sustainable Production and Consumption.
The work is forward looking on a very topical issue of sustainability facing many countries. The authors have produced a very well written and clearly presented piece of work making it ideal for others to replicate and use in future work.
The paper looks at future resource pathways, and describes a resource analysis in relation to Uganda's 2012 and 2050 agricultural resource demand at national, district and local scales. The results identify where the competing water land and energy resource constraints are and how they vary from local (sub-county), regional, to national scale so that potential policy interventions can be appropriately targeted.
The judges' commented as follows: "The paper is a solid paper showing comprehensive use of data and good analysis of results. The work is forward looking on a very topical issue of sustainability facing many countries. The authors have produced a very well written and clearly presented piece of work making it ideal for others to replicate and use in future work.
It's cumulative merit in terms of the medal criteria of readability/ presentation; originality; novelty; technical content; and the value as a catalyst; was higher than all other candidates and there was consensus amongst the committee members that the papers was a deserving winner of the Senior Moulton medal for 2015."
The work initially grew out of The Foreseer project at the University of Cambridge, that investigates the ‘nexus’ of water, energy and land resources. It is a scenario generation tool which includes natural resource supply, transformation, and use, as well as the ways in which they affect each other. The Foreseer tool also calculates greenhouse gas emissions and other measures of stress, such as groundwater depletion, in response to user-defined scenarios. The basis of the tool is a set of linked physical models for these resources plus the technologies that transform these resources into final services.
The Senior Moulton Medal has been awarded annually since 1929 for the most meritorious paper published by the IChemE for the last year.
