The Food-Energy-Water Nexus:

William Easterling, NSF assistant director for Geosciences and Professor of Geography at Penn State has commented: "Food, energy and water have long been studied independently or in pairs, but not all three at once... Now, novel ways of examining all three together are yielding important new knowledge that will help us achieve food, water and energy security even with further population growth."

This week, we will read about the FEW Nexus and the Environmental Impacts of Agriculture.

As you go through the material for this week, consider the following:

• How might thinking about food-energy-water all at the same time improve decision making around sustainability?
• What links do you see to past weeks (Planetary Boundaries, Social-Ecological Systems, Governance and Environmental Justice)?
• Does the idea food-energy-water nexus consider justice and equity adequately?
• Do you believe we can produce enough food to feed the world and reduce the environmental impacts of food production? Do you see links to Malthusian thought in this weeks material?

Week 6 Checklist

Note: Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates.

The Food Energy Water Nexus:

Humanity depends upon the Earth's resources to provide key resources needed for human well-being and economic growth: food, energy, and water (FEW). In the face of growing pressure on our planet (see Lesson 1 - Planetary Boundaries), decisions about where and how to produce each of these must be considered carefully. There are clear trade-offs between the three, and multiple interdependences. In the face of these challenges, it is essential that we learn to think about the production of these resources in an integrated way. Geography has long excelled at thinking about such complex issues, as you have learned over the past weeks. We must find ways to best integrate social, ecological, physical and built environments to provide all three of these resources in a sustainable and just manner. The Food-Energy-Water Nexus is a new way of looking at things, and now supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Research publications proposing, testing and using FEW frameworks are only recently starting to emerge. 

The NSF notes "Known stressors in FEW systems include governance challenges, population growth and migration, land use change, climate variability, and uneven resource distribution. The interconnections and interdependencies associated with the FEW Nexus pose research grand challenges. To meet these grand challenges, there is a critical need for research that enables new means of adapting societal use of FEW systems." (Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS) [1]).

As you progress through the following weeks of content in the course (Lesson 7: Food, Lesson 8: Energy and Lesson 9: Water) keep thinking about each through a FEWs Nexus lense and watching for the interconnetions between them.

Required Reading:

Leck, H., Conway, D., Bradshaw, M., & Rees, J. (2015). Tracing the water–energy–food nexus: description, theory and practice. Geography Compass, 9(8), 445-460.

The authors examine reasons for the increase in research focused around the nexus of water, energy, and food (WEF). In so doing, they investigate why it would be difficult to achieve the type of disciplinary boundary that is typically promoted in scholastic research and consider how to initiate many of the present theories and practices that have yet to be applied in the real world. Leck et al. (2015) indicate that there are although the nexus approach has been around prior to this increase, it has been challenging to encompass the interdependent WEF relationships and thus limiting its execution and progress at all scales of implementation. The future of nexus approaches to address global environmental change is promising should the movement be able to overcome previous hurdles. As advancements in technology to learn more of the linkages of WEF at varied scales as well as promoting collaboration between state and non-state entities continues, these hurdles will become more manageable.

"Identifying winners and losers in WEF nexus decision-making and giving explicit attention to justice and equity concerns are central for nexus agendas to be socially progressive (Dupar and Oates 2012; Stringer et al. 2014)."

"As Allouche et al. (2014: 23) explain, ‘food, water and energy have never been conceptually separated in the way that experts have sought to understand them. Indeed, it may be that the WEF nexus is the (re)discovery by experts working in silos of what practicing farmers and fishers already knew’."

"...scalar considerations are central to the nexus because water, energy or food interventions are not necessarily suitable or effective at all scales."

Huntington, H. P., Schmidt, J. I., Loring, P. A., Whitney, E., Aggarwal, S., Byrd, A. G., ... & Wilber, M. (2021). Applying the food–energy–water nexus concept at the local scale. Nature Sustainability, 4(8), 672-679.

This paper presents an effort to use FEW Nexus thinking to a specific social-ecological syste / setting in rural Alaska. In doing so they demonstrate that the framework can be applied beyond the theoretical. The authors raise concern that Nexus approaches fail to cover other factors that are very important to community well-being and may in fact be even more important than food, energy and water (in this case governance and transportation). They also note that proper consideration of these additional aspects of the system further complicates analysis.

Stein, C., C. Pahl-Wostl and J. Barron (2018). "Towards a relational understanding of the water-energy-food nexus: an analysis of embeddedness and governance in the Upper Blue Nile region of Ethiopia." Environmental Science & Policy 90: 173-182.

This paper provides a case study of what the study of the Food-Energy-Water Nexus looks like in real life: here in the upper Blue Nile watershed in Ethiopia. The paper tries to move from the abstract idea of the nexus to examine the collaboration and cross-sector coordination needed to achieve integrated management of Food, Energy, and Water production. As you read this paper, try to link back to your reading on governance in past weeks; what similarities and differences do you note?

NOTE: Links to the readings are located in the Week 6 module in Canvas.