A Design for a Data and Information Service to Address the Knowledge Needs of the Water-Energy-Food (W-E-F) Nexus and Strategies to Facilitate Its Implementation

Abstract

Food security is essential to sustain human societies. Food production flourishes when water, energy, and land are abundant, but more often it is limited by scarcities in one or more of these resources. In particular, food production is limited by the relatively fixed amount of water that circulates in the hydrosphere, the lack of new land for crops in many countries, and the depletion of critical minerals and fossil fuels in many source regions. An integrated Water-Energy-Food (W-E-F) Nexus planning and management approach promises improved resource efficiencies, new business opportunities, more coherent resource and environmental policies, and economies of scale for the data and information services underpinning better decision-making. This paper distills discussions on data and information from four regional workshops held as part of a Future Earth W-E-F Nexus Cluster project. The workshops reviewed ways to enhance the sustainability of the W-E-F Nexus through better governance; collecting, analyzing, and communicating data and information; and integrating both with management for better planning and decision-making. The focus of this paper is to explore the potential application of an integrated data and information system to enhance water, energy, and food sustainability. In particular, this paper's objective is to explore how a multisector W-E-F Nexus data and information system could be developed and operated to meet the planning and decision-making information needs of practitioners and to facilitate the implementation of the W-E-F Nexus concept. This "Hypothesis and Theory" paper provides a hypothesis and system design and proposes steps that could be taken to implement and test the system in a W-E-F Nexus environment. Data and information, along with modern technologies, can play a central role in facilitating paradigm shifts that reinforce the W-E-F Nexus by explicitly assessing environmental services, meeting the growing urban food demand, valuing water and other resources used to produce food and energy for export, promoting resource use efficiency through integrated planning and management, and strengthening links between the W-E-F Nexus and appropriate Sustainable Development Goals.

Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Critical Review, Practical Applications, and Prospects for Future Research

“…the harmonized "nexus database" or analytical framework for monitoring or trade-off analyses [16,[82][83][84][85][86][87] 3. the blueprint for overcoming institutional disconnect and power imbalances between sectors [88][89][90][91][92][93][94] C. Lack of Agreement and Clarity on: 1.…”

“…This toolbox gathers data to allow for modelling and analysis of WEF resources and their interconnectedness at a country level. Lawford [84] analysed the importance of integrated WEF nexus data and information to assist practitioners in planning and decisionmaking processes. He proposed WEFDIS (WEF nexus data and information system) to ensure that WEF data and information from satellites, in situ data networks, and other data sources are readily available.…”

“…He proposed WEFDIS (WEF nexus data and information system) to ensure that WEF data and information from satellites, in situ data networks, and other data sources are readily available. Eight proposed sequential and parallel measures to develop and implement WEFDIS and to structure WEFDIS are discussed in Lawford [84]. Accessibility and standardization of data are two important points to communicate and consolidate data and information from various sources.…”

Towards an operational irrigation management system for Sweden with a water-food-energy nexus perspective

“…The concept of water-food-energy (WFE) nexus was introduced during the 2008 World economic forum to discuss the important interlinkages among the water, food, and energy sectors highlighted by the global food security crisis 2008 (Dominic, 2011). The WFE nexus approach ensures the identification and quantification of the synergies among sectors, supports the sustainable management of natural resources data and tools for decision-makers (Lawford, 2019), promotes ecosystem protection, economic development, social equity (Sperling and Berke, 2017), and provides directions to mitigate climate change and adapt to climate changes (Eftelioglu et al, 2016). The agricultural and food production sectors are at the center of the nexus concept because both sectors require significant amounts of water and energy for irrigation and food production: 70% of the global water withdrawals and 30% of the world's total energy consumption are allocated to this sector (FAO, 2017).…”

“…Moreover, very few models are at the stage of implementing the WFE nexus approach (Dai et al, 2018;Shannak et al, 2018;Endo et al, 2019) and support the political decisions (Bazilian et al, 2011). Moreover, as highlight by Lawford (2019), there is a general data gap, both in the spatial and temporal dimensions, concerning the observation of key parameters for the WFE nexus analysis. Some examples of integrated WFE nexus tools development are provided in this section.…”