A Literature Review to Propose a Systematic Procedure to Develop “Nexus Thinking” Considering the Water–Energy–Food Nexus (original) (raw)
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A review of the water–energy–food nexus measurement and management approach
International Journal of Energy and Water Resources, 2019
Water, energy, and food are the fundamental resources for improving living conditions and sustainable development. Because substantial interdependencies and relationships exist among these three sectors, the word nexus between water-energy-food is being used to indicate the importance of managing them together and not in isolation. This paper reviews and analyzes the current status of water-energy-food nexus approach, which has attracted widespread attention in the past few years, with the aim to understand the nexus thinking and illustrate the methods and tools used in the nexus analysis. This is expected to help the policy makers and researchers to be better informed about the options for sustainable securing and managing these three resources. In addition, such integration between these three sectors will significantly help in achieving the goals of sustainable development, since the water-energy-food nexus is directly related to three goals 2, 6, and 7, which are, respectively, related to ensuring access to food, water, and sustainable energy for all.
The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: A systematic review of methods for nexus assessment
The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus is rapidly expanding in scholarly literature and policy settings as a novel way to address complex resource and development challenges. The nexus approach aims to identify tradeoffs and synergies of water, energy, and food systems, internalize social and environmental impacts, and guide development of cross-sectoral policies. However, while the WEF nexus offers a promising conceptual approach, the use of WEF nexus methods to systematically evaluate water, energy, and food interlinkages or support development of socially and politically-relevant resource policies has been limited. This paper reviews WEF nexus methods to provide a knowledge base of existing approaches and promote further development of analytical methods that align with nexus thinking. The systematic review of 245 journal articles and book chapters reveals that (a) use of specific and reproducible methods for nexus assessment is uncommon (less than one-third); (b) nexus methods frequently fall short of capturing interactions among water, energy, and food—the very linkages they conceptually purport to address; (c) assessments strongly favor quantitative approaches (nearly three-quarters); (d) use of social science methods is limited (approximately one-quarter); and (e) many nexus methods are confined to disciplinary silos—only about one-quarter combine methods from diverse disciplines and less than one-fifth utilize both quantitative and qualitative approaches. To help overcome these limitations, we derive four key features of nexus analytical tools and methods—innovation, context, collaboration, and implementation—from the literature that reflect WEF nexus thinking. By evaluating existing nexus analytical approaches based on these features, we highlight 18 studies that demonstrate promising advances to guide future research. This paper finds that to address complex resource and development challenges, mixed-methods and transdisciplinary approaches are needed that incorporate social and political dimensions of water, energy, and food; utilize multiple and interdisciplinary approaches; and engage stakeholders and decision-makers.
Water-Energy-Nexus, 2018
The recognition of the interlinked nature of water, energy and food (WEF) resources has resulted in growing momentum to change the approaches for managing these interlinked resources. Initially, models were developed as a mean of integrated methodology for watershed management. Several frameworks and models have been proposed to help policymakers understand the complexity of the nexus and to assist with planning and regulating these resources. Most countries and governments manage these natural resources with different institutions that have their own mission and objectives, and with their own staff, data, measures and tools. This has mostly led to huge variations in terms of methodological approach to design these models, type of data used and eventually results interpretations and policies design. We conducted a review of current literature on the water-energy-food nexus to understand what's known and what's missing and identify key opportunities and challenges facing WEF design and model-ing. Our analysis also identified the followings: Our review reveals that there are a limited number of models and frameworks that address all WEF together and there are even fewer models and frameworks that has diverse methods and transdisci-plinary approaches in analyzing the nexus. It's essential as we design out modeling tools to analyze the nexus to incorporate several dimensions beyond the WEF sectors such as political, social and economic in order to reach nexus thinking and therefore address complexity of the multi-sectoral resources. Agricultural sectors require significant amounts of energy as an input to production, yet few water-energy-food resource planning approaches have incorporated spatial cropping patterns and land use by combining energy and water requirements. Policymakers are provided with an effective way to analyze the nexus on an aggregate level using macro-drivers, but these often omit the complexity of managing the resources at a smaller scale where other factors such as climate and geography have tremendous influence on supply and demand. There are knowledge gaps pertaining the incorporation of spatial-temporal drivers as well as the spatial temporal dynamics of resource availability or accessibility. This is a significant component in the WEF framework design as natural resources are subject to dramatic changes over space and time. There are a considerable number of WEF framework and models that demonstrate promising tools to analyze the nexus but some of these models fall short of capturing interactions among nexus components due to lack of data sharing and availability.
Sustainability Science, 2023
To enhance water, energy, and food security and promote ecosystems conservation, it is necessary to design policies or solutions capable of addressing cross-sectoral challenges. In this paper, GoNEXUS SEF, an evaluation framework for codesigning and evaluating nexus solutions, is presented. This framework provides guidelines for conducting a nexus-coherence assessment to improve the governance of the water-energy-food-ecosystems nexus. The assessment involves a participatory process that integrates qualitative and quantitative methodologies through systemic approaches. The crucial aspects necessary in the development of methodologies that address the nexus have been identified and considered. The framework was applied to a practical case study, an increase in the irrigation water price in Andalusia-Spain for the horizon of 2030. Case study results revealed that the measure can generate synergies since it favours water savings, irrigation water efficiency and ecosystems conservation. However, trade-offs are observed, mainly undermining the economic development of agriculture in the region. GoNEXUS SEF has proven capable of evaluating nexus solutions by measuring cross-sectoral synergies and trade-offs. It highlights hidden properties and identifies leverage points and key aspects of a complex cross-sectoral system to apply nexus solutions more effectively to promote sustainable development. In addition, the framework can be adapted to fit different case studies, considering their own challenges and their spatial and temporal scales, which gives it a competitive advantage over other methodologies focused on analysing the nexus.
Research Guide for Water - Energy - Food Nexus Analysis
2018
Global food security faces increasing challenges from climate change, global population pressures, and increased urbanization. The Sustainable Development Goals demand progress on key dimensions of human development and environmental sustainability. However, as a result of growing natural resource scarcity, making progress in one area, such as food security, will likely adversely affect progress toward desired outcomes in other areas, such as water security or environmental sustainability. As a result, business-as-usual approaches are no longer an option. Instead, advances in food security need to be addressed within a nexus perspective incorporating key interlinkages with related sectors, including water and energy.
Implementation and Governance Issues in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus
International Journal of High School Research, 2021
With the increasing demand for water, food, and energy in the next few decades, the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus was created to examine the synergies between these key sectors and how they will be implemented in different communities. This paper reviews the current literature on nexus governance and local implementation. This review suggests that a strong understanding of the interconnectedness between the water, food, and energy sectors among decision makers, consideration of values and interests of local stakeholders, and availability of political support are essential for successful implementation of the WEF nexus model at the local level. Decentralized projects also contribute positively to households and local livelihoods. Through several global examples, this paper lists literature-based examples and case studies of how sustainable, rural livelihoods can be promoted with the nexus framework.
Discussion of “Challenges in operationalizing the water–energy–food nexus”
Hydrological Sciences Journal
In their opinion paper, Liu et al. highlight the insufficient development of methods such as integrated modelling tools to assess the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus system complexity. This can be attributed to the lack of research programmes addressing the WEF nexus, especially in the European Union. To enable the development of innovative research methods, we need educational and research programmes that explicitly focus on the WEF security nexus. These programmes should promote interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate hydrology as well as sciences related to energy and food security, and environmental governance.
2018
The purpose of this research is to develop an analytical and modelling approach that allows for the quantification of trade-offs between the water, energy and food nexus at different scales; allowing to go from national analysis of nexus stress by identifying and quantifying key intersectoral claims and trade-offs, up to a more detailed and even local specific analysis of the trade-offs. These trade-offs and the system understanding created by following the proposed steps for the analysis of nexus stress, inform them the design of Climate Smart Solutions and Strategies that make use of the most powerful leverage points and introduce or exploit existing synergies between the water-energy-food sectors. The national and local scales analyses following the proposed methodology have been applied to Ethiopia. At the national scale the integration has been done by making use of system analysis techniques in combination with the use of diverse modelling techniques for the quantification of ...
Tracing the Water–Energy–Food Nexus: Description, Theory and Practice
The 'nexus' between water, energy and food (WEF) has gained increasing attention globally in research, business and policy spheres. We review the premise of recent initiatives framed around the nexus, examine the challenge of achieving the type of disciplinary boundary crossing promoted by the nexus agenda and consider how to operationalise what has to date been a largely paper exercise. The WEF nexus has been promoted through international meetings and calls for new research agendas. It is clear from the literature that many aims of nexus approaches pre-date the recent nexus agenda; these have encountered significant barriers to progress, including challenges to cross-disciplinary collaboration, complexity, political economy (often perceived to be under-represented in nexus research) and incompatibility of current institutional structures. Indeed, the ambitious aims of the nexus—the desire to capture multiple interdependencies across three major sectors, across disciplines and across scales—could become its downfall. However, greater recognition of interdependencies across state and non-state actors, more sophisticated modelling systems to assess and quantify WEF linkages and the sheer scale of WEF resource use globally, could create enough momentum to overcome historical barriers and establish nexus approaches as part of a wider repertoire of responses to global environmental change.