Watersheds at the Nexus

Abstract

The interdependence of food, energy and water systems is often revealed in watersheds or catchment areas where land use, population growth, and increasing demand for food, energy, and water exert pressure on watershed ecosystem services that can lead to the environmental degradation and the depletion of natural capital. Watersheds are a critical scale at which to examine the nexus of food, energy, and water systems, and depending upon the scale and type of watershed, the intersection of these systems poses an array of challenges for the governance of natural resources. There are inherent challenges related to the downstream impacts of upstream land uses, including the production of food and energy. The challenges associated with resource access rights, designated land uses, and protection of ecosystem services become more difficult when watersheds share multiple jurisdictional borders and different systems of governance and protection. Addressing such challenges requires interdisciplinary scientific approaches in research as well as a synthesis and integration of cross-jurisdictional and interdisciplinary perspectives for effective cross-border watershed governance. The capacity for such integration varies widely across economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. This chapter examines the food–energy–water nexus through three case studies of watersheds that are subject to different pressures from interactions at the nexus, and that can be characterized in terms of resource abundance. Each of the watersheds also shares multiple national or regional borders and requires systems of cross-border governance and resource management. The three case studies include the Great Lakes of North America, the Amazon River Basin in South America, and the Lake Victoria Basin in East Africa. Each case study provides a description of the biophysical context, an overview of watershed challenges at the nexus of food, energy, and water systems, and a description of transboundary governance of each watershed. Capacity for effective governance is assessed for each watershed across a range of criteria including institutional capacity, coordination, distributional issues, social mobility, and the political-economic context. Emerging challenges call for a new framework for transboundary governance of the food–energy–water nexus in watersheds that are characterized by abundance.