An Organizing Principle for the Water-Energy-Food Nexus

Chad W Higgins,Majdi Abou Najm

doi:10.3390/su12198135

Chad W Higgins, Majdi Abou Najm

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12198135

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Oct 2, 2020
Citations: 11	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of California, Davis, John Muir Health

Abstract

The nexus between water, energy, and food has recently evolved as a resource-management concept to deal with this intimately interwoven set of resources, their complex interactions, and the growing and continuously changing internal and external set of influencing factors, including climate change, population growth, habits and lifestyles alternations, and the dynamic prices of water, energy, and food. While an intriguing concept, the global research community is yet to identify a unifying conceptual and mathematical framework capable of adapting to integrate gathered knowledge and ensuring inclusivity by accounting for all significant interactions and feedbacks (including natural processes and anthropogenic inputs) within all nexus domains. We present an organizing roadmap for a conceptual and mathematical representation of the nexus. Our hope is that this representation will organize the nexus research and formalize a way for a generalizable framework that can be used to advance our understanding of those complex interactions, with hope that such an approach will lead to a more resilient future with sustained resources for the future generations.

Highlights

Agriculture, energy, and water are coupled so strongly that actions to achieve sustainability in any individual domain will directly impact the others
Its elegant, yet deceiving, simplicity attracted a wide range of endorsements from researchers and policy-makers, embracing nexus-thinking as the new means to establish tradeoffs and boost synergies across nexus pillars
Nexus efforts seemed to balance multiple objectives whilst seeking to balance an annual budget of resources of differing units. Those efforts focused on the seemingly manageable exercise of multi-resource management framework where demands were met with supplies, albeit each uniquely dispersed in space, time, quality, and price

Summary

Introduction

Agriculture, energy, and water are coupled so strongly that actions to achieve sustainability in any individual domain will directly impact the others. The Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus [1] has emerged as a widely accepted concept that can replace the classic approaches centered around enhancing individual sectors’ productivities with a more collective philosophy focused on maximizing the nexus-system’s overall efficiencies. Nexus efforts seemed to balance multiple objectives whilst seeking to balance an annual budget of resources of differing units. Those efforts focused on the seemingly manageable exercise of multi-resource management framework where demands were met with supplies, albeit each uniquely dispersed in space, time, quality, and price (only to name the most significant attributes)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion