A water-energy-food security analysis tool for mining in Suriname: operationalizing the Mining Policy Framework of the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development

Appraising the Water‐Energy‐Food Nexus From a Sustainable Development Perspective: A Maturing Paradigm?

“…However, exploring the social‐ecological costs and benefits associated with extractive industry impacts on nexus resource sustainability—via a nexus approach—is still nascent, even though it may be gaining traction. Examples include: examining the impacts of unconventional oil and gas extraction on water scarcity and irrigated agriculture in Argentina (Rosa & D'Odorico, 2019); investigating the socio‐economic and environmental impacts of mining on communities and surrounding ecosystems in Suriname (Roy et al., 2016); highlighting how the costs (e.g., increased surface and groundwater withdrawals, heavy metal contamination of watercourses, heighten energy demand) and benefits (e.g., transportation, communication, employment and sanitation and waste infrastructure) of mining extend across sectors and differ over the lifetime of a mine (Huppé et al., 2015), and in Mpumalanga, South Africa, addressing key trade‐offs between coal mining and food production (Simpson et al., 2019). In China, the nexus approach has revealed unseen linkages among water, energy and food resources embedded within upstream production and downstream consumption processes for agricultural, manufacturing, construction, power, mining, transport, and services supply chains (Deng et al., 2020), whilst also demonstrating the spatial interconnections between these sectors at the level of provincial supply chains (Liang et al., 2020).…”