International audience | Chapters: 1) Public goods and farming. 2) Pesticides and sustainable agriculture. 3) Nitrogen use efficiency by annual and perennial crops. 4) Microalgae for bioremediation of distillery effluent. 5) No-till direct seeding for energy-saving rice production in China. 6) Agricultural water poverty index for a sustainable world. 7) Participatory rural appraisal to solve irrigation issues. 8) Bioavailability of soil P for plant nutrition. 9) Animal manure for smallholder agriculture in South Africa. 10) Vermicompost and soil quality.

Chapters: 1) Public goods and farming. 2) Pesticides and sustainable agriculture. 3) Nitrogen use efficiency by annual and perennial crops. 4) Microalgae for bioremediation of distillery effluent. 5) No-till direct seeding for energy-saving rice production in China. 6) Agricultural water poverty index for a sustainable world. 7) Participatory rural appraisal to solve irrigation issues. 8) Bioavailability of soil P for plant nutrition. 9) Animal manure for smallholder agriculture in South Africa. 10) Vermicompost and soil quality.

Chapters: 1) Public goods and farming. 2) Pesticides and sustainable agriculture. 3) Nitrogen use efficiency by annual and perennial crops. 4) Microalgae for bioremediation of distillery effluent. 5) No-till direct seeding for energy-saving rice production in China. 6) Agricultural water poverty index for a sustainable world. 7) Participatory rural appraisal to solve irrigation issues. 8) Bioavailability of soil P for plant nutrition. 9) Animal manure for smallholder agriculture in South Africa. 10) Vermicompost and soil quality.

Socioeconomic and climatic changes and limited water resources pose various challenges to water, energy, and food sectors across the globe. The inevitable interactions between water, energy, and food systems bring about trade-offs but also synergies under different decisions and policies. To gain insights into these issues, we developed a water-energy-food (WEF) nexus model that incorporates both production (supply) and demands sides of WEF systems into a single system-of-systems model using the system dynamics (SD) approach. The model is applied to Saskatchewan, Canada, and so is named WEF-Sask. The model results reveal the various levels of sensitivities of water, energy, and food (and feed) sectors to the socioeconomic and climatic drivers. The analysis of trade-offs and synergies shows that the proposed large irrigation expansion (400%) boosts food production by 1.6% while reducing hydropower production by 2.7% in Saskatchewan. Wind energy expansion strategy (from 5% to 30% of total capacity) makes synergies that not only contribute to electricity supply but also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, industrial water demand, and groundwater use by 2.0, 5.7, and 3.8%, respectively. Biofuel use (blending mandate: 10% ethanol and 5% biodiesel) in transportation cuts GHG emissions by 1.2% but reduces the potential food export (food surplus) by 5.0%. The WEF-Sask model allows for scenario analysis toward integrated resources management, and its generic model structure can be expanded to other regions.

Desalination is increasingly put forward as a sustainable local solution to water scarcity in combination with the exploitation of renewable energy sources. However, the complexity of the resource nexus entails the unavoidable existence of pros and cons across its various dimensions that can only be assessed at different scales of analysis. In turn, these pros and cons entail different winners and losers among the different social actors linked through the nexus. To address these challenges, a novel approach to resource nexus assessment is put forward, based on multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM) and recognizing the resource nexus as a wicked problem. The integrated representation identifies the existence of biophysical constraints determined by processes both under human control (in the technosphere) and beyond human control (in the biosphere). The approach is illustrated with a local case study of desalination in the Canary Islands, Spain. The material presented has been generated in the context of the project “Moving towards adaptive governance in complexity: Informing nexus security” (MAGIC) for use in participatory processes of co-production of knowledge claims about desalination, a prerequisite for informed policy deliberation.

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