Abstract
Natural resources are becoming scarcer and, together with the growth of the population, a widespread situation of overexploitation is inevitable that has become the biggest challenge for today’s world. In this context, the agri-food sector has a considerable environmental impact in terms of water and energy consumption. For about two decades, the Water–Energy–Food Nexus (WEF) Nexus has been trying to address this problem, focusing on efficient interrelationships among these dimensions. The objective of this work is to analyse the evolution of research on WEF Nexus in the agri-food sector and its development in scientific databases. For that purpose, a bibliometric study was carried out with publications obtained from the Scopus database, examining the main journals, authors, institutions, countries, subject areas, funding sponsors, and keywords. Moreover, a final section is specifically dedicated to the agri-food innovations in WEF Nexus in order to explore innovative aspects to effectively overcome technical barriers that hinder a real implementation of the Nexus approach. The results show that, over the past decade, Nexus research in the agri-food sector has been growing exponentially. The top country in this field is USA, the most studied area is environmental science, and the most relevant keywords are “energy use”, “water budget”, “food security”, “sustainable development”, and “water resources”.
Highlights
Following past failures in Water–Energy–Food (WEF) resource management, academics, policy makers, and planners proposed a nexus approach to understand the synergies, trade-offs, and spill-over effects of interconnecting these components [1]
The WEF Nexus has become popular since the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2008, held in Davos (Switzerland)
The first records date back to 2008, which means that the WEF Nexus is a recent research area
Summary
Following past failures in Water–Energy–Food (WEF) resource management, academics, policy makers, and planners proposed a nexus approach to understand the synergies, trade-offs, and spill-over effects of interconnecting these components [1]. The origins of the WEF Nexus go back to the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilisation of Resources (1949), where more than 600 scientists from some 50 countries discussed the sustainable management of the needs of a growing population [2,3]. This has been followed by many workshops, projects, and conferences focused on the study of Nexus components [4]. The global goals related to economic development from the Nexus position were recognised. The SDGs directly linked to the Nexus would be SDG 2 (food security), SDG 6 (clean water), and SDG 7 (modern energy), and indirectly SDG 13 (climate change) and SDG 15 (terrestrial ecosystems) [10]
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