A quantitative analysis framework for water-food-energy nexus in an agricultural watershed using WEAP-MODFLOW

Abstract

The challenges of securing safe water supply, sustainable food production and energy conservation make quantitatively analysis of the water-food-energy (WFE) nexus in agricultural watersheds a very important issue. At present, understanding of the complex interactions among the WFE nexus in agricultural watersheds considering the conjunctive management of surface water and groundwater are limited. Based on the WEAP-MODFLOW, this paper proposed a quantitative analysis framework to analyze the interactions among WFE nexus in agricultural watersheds, which considers various scenarios such as water-saving irrigation and drought. The results indicated that this framework can sensitively capture the existing trade-offs and synergies to identify possible comprehensive measures to ensure safe access to water, food, and energy in agricultural watersheds especially in drought conditions. It could also provide valuable assistance for managers and policymakers to think beyond sectors to increase the resilience of WFE sectors under changing environment. Our results show that the impacts of drought have reduced the amount of surface water irrigation due to limited surface water supply, resulting in more than doubled groundwater extraction which may pose a crisis for sustainable use of groundwater, and an increase of 47% in energy consumption for pumping. After integrated management measures, food production rose by 6% while the groundwater level was restored by 0.48 m compared to that under drought, and energy consumption was reduced by 3% compared with water-saving irrigation only. The sustainability index results under different scenarios also reflect the higher sustainability of integrated measures management under drought impacts (SI = 0.13).