Abstract
Due to the unsustainable consumption of resources and climate change, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the security of the water–energy–food nexus, especially in regions with low availability. Thus, the need to design more resilient systems is key to sustainable development. Quantifying resilience in integrated systems such as the water–energy–food nexus is a useful way to identify vulnerable areas of the system and thereby take corrective actions to reduce the incidence of interruptions to basic services. Therefore, this work presents a systematic approach to assess the resilience of the water–energy–food nexus in arid and semi-arid regions. Through the proposed approach, it is possible to evaluate how the system failures caused by hurricanes, low-temperature events, and droughts affect the supply of water, energy and food. A resilience index is proposed, which involves penalization costs associated with the resource supply failures of the system. To apply the proposed approach, scenarios corresponding to past conditions and future projections were evaluated for two Mexican arid cities. The results show that in future years the nexus will be vulnerable to extreme events if the conditions for the resource management do not change. The proposed approach allows estimating the economic losses associated with the existence of natural disasters, making it an efficient decision-making tool to implement strategies and improve the security of the water–energy–food nexus.
Highlights
Nowadays, satisfying the needs of basic resources for life, such as water, energy, and food, represents one of the biggest problems around the world (Deng et al 2020; Jirapornvaree et al 2021); this is mainly due to urbanization, resource constraints and inadequate management (Engstrom et al 2017), governance structures, policies (Kaddoura and El Khatib 2017; Anser et al 2020), and the impacts of climate change (Dargin et al 2020)
The proper planning of the water-energy-food nexus is key for urban sustainability
The results show that it is possible to identify vulnerable areas related to the existence of natural disasters and thereby look for alternatives to maintain the security of the nexus
Summary
Nowadays, satisfying the needs of basic resources for life, such as water, energy, and food, represents one of the biggest problems around the world (Deng et al 2020; Jirapornvaree et al 2021); this is mainly due to urbanization, resource constraints and inadequate management (Engstrom et al 2017), governance structures, policies (Kaddoura and El Khatib 2017; Anser et al 2020), and the impacts of climate change (Dargin et al 2020). The frequency in the occurrence of different natural disasters (such as freezing, droughts, and flood) has been increased (Botzen et al 2019) These events have put the production and availability of resources at risk; resilience is a critical factor that must be included in the nexus assessment for urban sustainability. The quantification of resilience in optimization systems has brought great benefits, since it allows identifying the scenarios where some failures that decrease the performance of the system may occur, and be able to make decisions on how to address the problem before, during, or after the design of the system This shows the importance of implementing resilient planning frameworks compared to conventional planning methods
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