Across the world, human activity is approaching planetary boundaries. In northwest China, in particular, the coal industry and agriculture are competing for key limited inputs of land and water. In this situation, the traditional approach to planning the development of each sector independently fails to deliver sustainable solutions, as solutions made in sectorial &lsquo:silos&rsquo: are often suboptimal for the entire economy. We propose a spatially detailed cost-minimizing model for coal and agricultural production in a region under constraints on land and water availability. We apply the model to the case study of Shanxi province, China. We show how such an integrated optimization, which takes maximum advantage of the spatial heterogeneity in resource abundance, could help resolve the conflicts around the water&ndash:food&ndash:energy (WFE) nexus and assist in its management. We quantify the production-possibility frontiers under different water-availability scenarios and demonstrate that in water-scarce regions, like Shanxi, the production capacity and corresponding production solutions are highly sensitive to water constraints. The shadow prices estimated in the model could be the basis for intelligent differentiated water pricing, not only to enable the water-resource transfer between agriculture and the coal industry, and across regions, but also to achieve cost-effective WFE management.

Hydropower plays an important role as the global energy system moves towards a less carbon-intensive and sustainable future as promoted under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article provides a systematic review of the impacts from policy, climate change and Water-Energy-Food (W-E-F) nexus on hydropower development at global scale. Asia, Africa and Latin America are hotspots promoting hydropower development with capacity expansion, while Europe and North America focus on performance improvement and environment impacts mitigation. Climate change is projected to improve gross hydropower potential (GHP) at high latitude of North Hemisphere and tropical Africa and decrease that in the US, South Africa and south and central Europe. Analysis from W-E-F nexus highlights the importance of integrated approaches as well as cross-sectoral coordination so as to improve resources use efficiency and achieve sustainable hydropower development. These three factors together shape the future of hydropower and need to be considered for planning and operation purpose.

Water scarcity severely affects drylands threatening their food security, whereas, the oil and gas industry produces significant and increasing volumes of produced water that could be partly reused for agricultural irrigation in these regions. In this review, we summarise recent research and provide a broad overview of the potential for oil and gas produced water to irrigate food crops in drylands. The quality of produced water is often a limiting factor for the reuse in irrigation as it can lead to soil salinisation and sodification. Although the inappropriate use of produced water in irrigation could be damaging for the soil, the agricultural sector in dry areas is often prone to challenges in soil salinity. There is a lack of knowledge about the main environmental and economic conditions that could encourage or limit the development of irrigation with oil and gas effluents at the scale of drylands in the world. Cheaper treatment technologies in combination with farm-based salinity management techniques could make the reuse of produced water relevant to irrigate high value-crops in hyper-arid areas. This review paper approaches an aspect of the energy-water-food nexus: the opportunities and challenges behind the reuse of abundant oil and gas effluents for irrigation in hydrocarbon-rich but water-scarce and food-unsecured drylands.

The world's population is expected to grow from 7.4 billion at present to 10.0 billion by 2055. Combined with the expected rise in living standards, urbanization and growing demands for animal feed and energy from crops, this requires a substantial increase in cereal production to ensure sustainable food security at affordable prices. Overall, global cereal production meets current demand and the global cereal stock is stable. Achieving the required increase in cereal production seems to be possible. The contributors to the Theme Contribute to Food Security by Optimal Use of Water of the 6th World Water Forum (WWF6) identified nine targets that address the relevant aspects. They reviewed existing and future needs, as well as existing and potential solutions to reach the targets. The contributors to the Theme Water for Food of the 7th World Water Forum (WWF7) elaborated on this work and focused more on the progress so far as well as on issues related to implementation, and formulated a goal and eight objectives to be achieved. This paper presents a summarized overview of key issues, findings, targets, objectives, solutions and recommendations of WWF6 and WWF7 with respect to water for food, while taking into account developments since then and updated data. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

With continuous population increase and economic growth, challenges on securing sufficient energy, water, and food supplies are amplifying. Water plays the most important role in the energy-water-food (E-W-F) nexus issue such as energy supply (clean hydropower energy generation), water supply (drinking water), and food supply (agricultural irrigation water). Therefore, water quantity simulation & forecasting become an important issue in E-W-F nexus problem. Water quantity simulation & forecasting model, such as rainfall-runoff (RR) hydrological model has become a useful tool which can significantly improve efficiency of the hydropower energy generation, water supply management, and agricultural irrigation water utilization. The accuracy and reliability of the water quantity simulation & forecasting model are significantly affected by the model parameters. Therefore, demand of effective and fast model parameter optimization tool for solving the E-W-F nexus problem increases significantly. The shuffled complex evolution developed at University of Arizona (SCE-UA) has been recognized as an effective global model parameter optimization method for more than 20years and is highly suited to solve the E-W-F nexus problem. However, the computational efficiency of the SCE-UA dramatically deteriorates when applied to complex E-W-F nexus problem. For the purpose of solving this conundrum, a fast parallel SCE-UA was proposed in this paper. The parallel SCE-UA was implemented on the novel heterogeneous computing hardware and software systems which were constituted by the Intel multi-core CPU, NVIDIA many-core GPU, and PGI Accelerator Visual Fortran (with OpenMP and CUDA). Performance comparisons between the parallel and serial SCE-UA were carried out based on two case studies, the Griewank benchmark function optimization and a real world IHACRES RR hydrological model parameter optimization. Comparison results indicated that the parallel SCE-UA outperformed the serial one and has good application prospects for solving the water quantity simulation & forecasting model parameter calibration in the E-W-F nexus problem.

Local-scale opportunities to address challenges of the water–food nexus in the developing world need to be embraced. Borehole-garden permaculture is advocated as one such opportunity that involves the sustainable use of groundwater spilt at hand-pump operated borehole supplies that is otherwise wasted. Spilt water may also pose health risks when accumulating as a stagnant pond. Rural village community use of this grey-water in permaculture projects to irrigate borehole gardens is proposed to primarily provide economic benefit whereby garden-produce revenue helps fund borehole water-point maintenance. Water-supply sustainability, increased food/nutrition security, health protection from malaria, and business opportunity benefits may also arise. Our goal has been to develop an, experience-based, framework for delivery of sustainable borehole-garden permaculture and associated benefits. This is based upon data collection and permaculture implementation across the rural Chikwawa District of Malawi during 2009–17. We use, stakeholder interviews to identify issues influencing uptake, gathering of stagnant pond occurrence data to estimate amelioration opportunity, quantification of permaculture profitability to validate economic potential, and critical assessment of recent permaculture uptake to identify continuing problems. Permaculture was implemented at 123 sites representing 6% of District water points, rising to 26% local area coverage. Most implementations were at, or near, newly drilled community-supply boreholes; hence, amelioration of prevalent stagnant ponds elsewhere remains a concern. The envisaged benefits of permaculture were manifest and early data affirm projected garden profitability and spin-off benefits of water-point banking and community micro-loan access. However, a diversity of technical, economic, social and governance issues were found to influence uptake and performance. Example issues include greater need for improved bespoke garden design input, on-going project performance assessment, and coordinated involvement of multi-sector governmental-development bodies to underpin the integrated natural-resource management required. The developed framework aims to manage the identified issues and requires the concerted action of all stakeholders. Based on the probable ubiquity of underlying issues, the framework is expected to be generalizable to the wider developing world. However, this particular application of permaculture represents a fraction of its greater potential opportunity for rural communities that should be explored.

PURPOSE: The food processing industry is a major consumer of energy and water, the consumption of which has environmental impacts. This work develops a method to determine process-specific water use and utilizes an existing energy use toolbox to calculate the energy and water required for each step of food processing. A life cycle assessment (LCA) is conducted to determine how much processing contributes to a particular product’s cradle to gate impacts for two impact categories. METHODS: A method to determine water use at each unit process was developed, and in conjunction with an already developed energy use unit process toolbox, the methods were tested using two case studies. Processing data such as flow rates, operation temperatures, and food losses were used from two Swiss food production facilities. Calculation results were compared to measured facility data such as yearly energy and water use. Results were then used to develop LCAs for a total of seven food products, including five types of juice and two types of potato products. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The toolboxes were able to calculate the water use of both facilities within 25%, the thermal energy use within 9%, and electricity use within 24%. Impacts from processing were particularly important for the potato products, particularly potato flakes, due to impacts stemming from thermal energy use. For juices, impacts due to raw material growth dominate the LCA, and impacts due to processing are much less significant. A unit process analysis may not be necessary when there is little variation in the unit processes between the different products. In this case, a simple allocation of measured facility energy and water data may be sufficient for calculating the impacts associated with processing. However, products with largely varying unit processes may have very different impacts. Impacts are sensitive to the type of energy required (thermal or electrical) and the sources of electricity and water. CONCLUSIONS: These water and energy toolboxes can improve transparency in processing and identify the most water- and energy-intensive steps; however, in facilities with similar products, such an extensive analysis may not be necessary. Results from these calculations are useful in developing food product LCAs.

The majority of rural Indian households remain dependent on traditional, inefficient and harmful household energy technologies. Rural households make their energy decisions with respect to the Water-Energy-Food security (WEF) Nexus jointly, however, previous research initiatives have analyzed household energy access problem in isolation. Taking this WEF nexus into account, this thesis investigates factors influencing household energy transition and identifies an optimal village energy system (VES) for the rural communities in Uttar Pradesh, India. The thesis also analyzes the distributional impacts of VES on different categories of rural households.<br /> Using detailed household survey data, Logit and Zoib (zero one inflated beta) regression techniques were applied to analyze household's activities and to identify factors influencing household energy transition. The results showed that regular non-agricultural income of household's male member increases the probability of household's modern cooking energy and modern lighting transition by 8.6% and 13.6%, respectively. It was found that household's higher agricultural dependence and resource endowments (more labor and cattle) lead to higher share of traditional bioenergy consumption in the total cooking energy mix. Proximity to markets and high household income were observed to positively influence household modern cooking and lighting transition. Local institutions such as local bio-energy markets and barter trade for labor- bioenergy were observed to have significant influence on household energy choice. Results also showed that government's policy instrument such as household connection to government LPG scheme is associated with 20.5% increased probability of household using modern cooking energy as its primary cooking fuel. Results also indicated that social factors such as higher female education and young age of household head are associated with household's increased modern cooking energy consumption in its total cooking energy mix.<br /> The thesis utilized linear optimization technique to formulate a village energy model in GAMS (General Algebraic Modeling Software). The model identified an optimal Village Energy System (VES) considering all possible energy sources and technologies (energy systems) as well as their linkages with food security. Results confirmed energy systems interdependencies for the rural communities. For instance, results showed that the levelized cost of electricity generation from biomass gasifier power system is 2.54 INR/ MJ as compared to 2.89 INR/ MJ from grid electricity-battery based power system. However, model selected the latter for fulfilling village's night time power needs while it assigned higher shadow price of 0.143 INR / MJ to the former. This happened because possible utilization of gasifier power system was expected to create scarcities of local bio-energy resources, resulting in costlier cooking energy system for the village. It was found that DES (Decentralized Energy System) provides demand side energy management opportunities with different energy prices at different timings of the day. Results also showed that high cost of finance deters possible adoption of renewable power technologies, such as solar power.<br /> Lastly, the thesis constructed an agricultural household model linked with VES to analyze VES's welfare consequences on rich and poor households. Here, household had the opportunity to purchase VES's energy services and sell its bio-energy feedstocks to VES. For the poor household, this interaction with VES led to its increased agricultural production with around 22% increase in its farm area cultivation in summers, as well as led to reduction in its off-farm labor by around 11% which is then utilized in its own agriculture. Overall, this interaction resulted in around 4% increase in poor household's annual income. On the down side, this interaction led to poor household shifting towards dirtier cooking energy technologies, resulting in increased external costs and CO2 emissions by around 27% and 45%, respectively. On the other hand, VES did not impact rich household's food production and only marginally increased its economic gain. However, it led to rich household shifting towards cleaner cooking energy thereby resulting in reduction of its external costs almost by half. | <strong>Dezentrale Energie in Indien und ihre Synergien mit der Wasser-Energie-Nahrungsmittelsicherheits (WEF) Nexus</strong><br /> Die Mehrheit der ländlichen indischen Haushalte ist auf traditionelle, ineffiziente und schädliche Haushalts-Energietechnologien angewiesen. Die Entscheidungsprozesse ländlicher Haushalte, wie Energie genutzt wird, wird in Bezug auf der Nexus Wasser-Energie-Nahrungsmittelsicherheit (WEF) getroffen. Jedoch haben die früheren wissenschaftlichen Analysen die Probleme des Energiezugangs von Haushalten selektiv und isoliert betrachtet. Unter Berücksichtigung des WEF-Nexus untersucht diese Arbeit Faktoren, die die häusliche Energiewende beeinflussen und entwickelt ein optimiertes Dorfenergiesystem (VES) für ländliche Gemeinden in Uttar Pradesh, Indien. Weiterhin analysiert die Arbeit die unterschiedlichen Auswirkungen des VES auf arme und reiche ländliche Haushalte.<br /> Mit Hilfe detaillierter Haushaltsumfragedaten wurden die Regressionsverfahren Logit und Zoib (zero one inflated beta) angewandt, um die häuslichen Aktivitäten zu analysieren und Faktoren zu identifizieren, welche die häusliche Energiewende beeinflussen. Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass das regelmäßige nicht-landwirtschaftliche Einkommen des männlichen Haushaltsmitgliedes die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass der Haushalt moderne Kochenergie und moderne Beleuchtung nutzt, um 8,6% bzw. 13,6% erhöht. Eine höhere landwirtschaftliche Abhängigkeit und die Ressourcenausstattung des Haushalts (mehr Vieh und Arbeiter) führen zu einem höheren Anteil des traditionellen Bioenergieverbrauchs am Kochenergiemix. Die Nähe zu den Märkten und das hohe Haushaltseinkommen haben sich positiv auf den Übergang zu modernen Haushalts-Energietechnologien ausgewirkt. Lokale Einrichtungen wie Bioenergiemärkte und der Tauschhandel (Arbeit für Bioenergie) haben einen signifikanten Einfluss auf die Energiewahl im Haushalt. Die Ergebnisse zeigten auch, dass das politische Instrument der Einbindung an das staatliche LPG-System zu einer um 20,5% höheren Wahrscheinlichkeit führt, dass der Haushalt moderne Kochenergie als primären Kochbrennstoff verwendet. Die Ergebnisse deuteten auch darauf hin, dass soziale Faktoren wie eine höhere Bildung von Frauen und ein junges Alter des Haushaltsvorstehers zu einem höheren Anteil moderner Energien am Kochenergiemix führen.<br /> Die Dissertation verwendet eine lineare Optimierungstechnik, um ein Dorf-Energiemodell in GAMS (General Algebraic Modeling Software) zu formulieren. Das Modell wählt ein optimales Village Energy System (VES) unter Berücksichtigung aller möglichen Energiequellen und Technologien sowie der Kopplung des Energiesystems mit der Ernährungssicherheit. Die Ergebnisse bestätigten die gegenseitigen Abhängigkeiten der Energiesysteme für die ländlichen Gemeinden. Die Ergebnisse zeigten zum Beispiel, dass die Stromgestehungskosten aus dem Biomassevergaser-Stromversorgungssystem 2,54 INR / MJ betragen, verglichen mit 2,89 INR / MJ aus dem Netzstrom-batteriebasierten Stromsystem. Das Modell entschied sich jedoch für Letzteres, um den nächtlichen Strombedarf des Dorfes zu decken, während es dem anderen System einen höheren Schattenpreis von 0,143 INR / MJ zuwies. Dies ist darauf zurückzuführen, dass eine mögliche Nutzung des Vergaserstroms dazu führen kann, dass Knappheiten lokaler Bioenergieressourcen entstehen, was zu einem teureren Kochenergiesystem. Es wurde festgestellt, dass DES (Decentralized Energy System) nachfrageorientierte Möglichkeiten des Energiemanagements bietet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen auch, dass hohe Finanzierungskosten eine mögliche Einführung erneuerbarer Energietechnologien verhindern.<br /> Abschließend entwickelte die Arbeit ein landwirtschaftliches Haushaltsmodell in Verbindung mit VES, um die Auswirkungen von VES auf reiche und arme Haushalte zu analysieren. Hier hatte der Haushalt die Möglichkeit, VES-Energiedienstleistungen zu kaufen und seine Bioenergie-Rohstoffe an VES zu verkaufen. Bei einem armen Haushalt führte diese Interaktion zu einer Steigerung der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion (ca. 22%) und einer Reduzierung der landwirtschaftlichen Arbeit in fremden Betrieben um ca. 11%. Alles zusammen führte zu einem Anstieg des Jahreseinkommens des armen Haushalts um ca. 4%. Andererseits führte dies dazu, dass die Kochenergietechnik armer Haushalte schmutziger wurde was zu erhöhten externen Kosten führte (ca. 27%). Demgegenüber wurde die Nahrungsmittelproduktion reicher Haushalte von VES nicht beeinflusst und erhöhte nur geringfügig den wirtschaftlichen Gewinn. Jedoch verlagerten sich reiche Haushalte in Richtung sauberer Kochenergien, wodurch die externen Kosten um fast die Hälfte reduziert wurden.

Twenty-four adult Beagles were utilised to evaluate the partial replacement of wheat bran with corn gluten feed without steep water on digestibility and characteristics of faeces. The treatments were 0 (no substitution), 30, 60 or 90 g/kg of corn gluten without steep water. There was no effect (p > .05) on the digestibility coefficients (g/kg) of dry matter (0.771), organic matter (0.806), crude protein (0.813), ether extract (0.798), crude fibre (0.393), neutral detergent fibre (0.425), acid detergent fibre (0.286) and crude energy (0.812), whilst there was effect (p < .05) on the digestible and metabolisable energy. There were effects (p < .05) for dry matter and pH of faeces but no effect (p > .05) was found on the remaining faecal characteristics: excretion for 100 g of food (56.77 g), excretion (129.6 g/day and 49.0 g dry matter/day), score (3.90), dry matter excretion for 100 g of food (22.86 g), buffering capacity (BC) at pH 5 (57.81), ammonia nitrogen (1.46 g/kg of faecal dry matter) and water balance (333.25 mL/day), in vivo and in situ gas production (p > .05). Corn gluten feed without steep water can be utilised to replace up to 90 g/kg of wheat bran without causing negative effect on the digestibility and characteristics of faeces.