Water-Energy-Food Nexus Analysis for Sustainable Resources Management

Dear Colleagues,

Food, water, and energy resources are three of the essentials for human life and economic activities. Demand for all three is increasingly driven by global urbanization, changing diets, and sustained poverty alleviation. Meanwhile, there exist multiple, complicated, and close links between the three resources. The emergence of the “nexus” approach to research in the context of water, energy, and food (WEF) implies that our perception of natural resources transfers from single-sector analysis to interdependencies and connections across the three resources. Scholars have focused on the WEF nexus by accounting for economic activities and human life, investigating inextricable linkages between WEF resources by transdisciplinary approaches, and forecasting future demands for WEF resources.

While the importance, framework, and methods used to study the interrelationships between the WEF resources have been proposed and developed, the WEF nexus still requires ongoing research. First, the interrelationships between the three resources are not linear or one-way. Methodology gaps remain in revealing multiple interactions of changes in one system to another, in which transdisciplinary tools that are not limited to environment, ecology, geography, management sciences, and economics should be introduced as well. Second, the WEF nexus is facing an increasingly volatile and uncertain world, especially considering the unpredictable disruptions of climatic disasters, economic shocks, and public health events. Risks can be transmitted and amplified within the interlinked systems. The characterization of risks, the simulation of risk consequences, and the improvement of resilience require more research. Last, but not least, the use of new data sources reflects the interdisciplinary characteristics of WEF nexus research. For instance, data from social media and field surveys can draw more specific features of the consumption of WEF resources. Data from remote sensing imagery can reveal the construction of WEF infrastructures. Datasets with higher spatiotemporal resolution can facilitate better accounting, simulation, and optimization of the WEF nexus.

This Special Issue will provide a platform for presenting the latest research on the WEF nexus and identifying research gaps that might still remain. The Special Issue themes include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:

• Current status, challenges, and barriers for sustainability and resilience in the WEF nexus;
• Discussions of how one resource in the WEF nexus is related to the other two, especially with a focus on water systems;
• System-level analysis of the linkages of WEF with the environment (e.g., climate change, pollution);
• Approaches and models needed for nexus research;
• New data sources for analyzing, simulating, and forecasting the nexus;
• Investment and finance for the sustainable management of energy, water, and food resources;
• Case studies or practices of the nexus governance/planning (e.g., river basins, urban);
• Solutions and strategies towards integrated resource management.

Dr. Chunyan Wang
Dr. Lu Lin
Prof. Dr. Chao Zhang
Prof. Dr. Shen Qu
Guest Editors

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• water system
• energy system
• food system
• environment
• data-driven modeling
• resilience
• nexus governance
• integrated management
• water resource management
• transdisciplinary approaches