Conflicting demands for food and water, exacerbated by increasing population, increase the risks of food insecurity, poverty and environmental damage in major river systems. Agriculture remains the predominant water user, but the linkage between water, agriculture and livelihoods is more complex than “water scarcity increases poverty”. The response of both agricultural and non-agricultural systems to increased pressure will affect livelihoods. Development will be constrained in closed basins if increased demand for irrigation deprives other users or if existing agricultural use constrains non-agricultural activities and in open basins if agriculture cannot feed an expanding or changing population or if the river system loses capacity due to degradation or over-exploitation.

Over the past two centuries, Iranian agricultural policy and practice have been developed dramatically, mostly in response to population growth, gradual improvements in technology and science, several revolutions, one major war and recent international sanctions. Until the mid-20th Century, Iran was an agrarian society, barely distinguishable from other countries in the region. It then shifted to an industrial society supported by oil, with agriculture lagging, but since then, major agricultural policy shifts have occurred. First, a series of inappropriate national laws regarding land tenure converted large holdings into small pieces of low-yielding lands. Then, the Islamic Revolution occurred in 1978, followed by a subsequent eight-year war with Iraq, which shook the country's economy and left many farms devastated and abandoned. At that point, the food supply chain and provision were in chaos. The Government prioritised food self-sufficiency by heavily subsidising farm inputs and investment into water management, power plants and food processing plants. By the mid-2000s, despite the pressures of rapid population growth and severe drought conditions, the country became largely self-sufficient in major food crops. Government subsidies rose to unsustainable levels, and a large amount of food was being wasted throughout the food chain. In response, the Government removed subsidies from the food and energy sectors and in 2010 provided financial support for those on low incomes. Recent geopolitical disruptors have contributed further to an unstable food-energy-water nexus.

Iran’s focus on food self-sufficiency has led to an emphasis on increasing water volumes available for irrigation with little attention to water use efficiency, and no attention at all to the role of consumption and trade. To better understand the development of water consumption in relation to food production, consumption, and trade, we carried out the first comprehensive water footprint assessment (WFA) for Iran, for the period 1980–2010, and estimated the water saving per province associated with interprovincial and international crop trade. Based on the AquaCrop model, we estimated the green and blue water footprint (WF) related to both the production and consumption of 26 crops, per year and on a daily basis, for 30 provinces of Iran. We find that, in the period 1980–2010, crop production increased by 175%, the total WF of crop production by 122%, and the blue WF by 20%. The national population grew by 92%, and the crop consumption per capita by 20%, resulting in a 130% increase in total food consumption and a 110% increase in the total WF of national crop consumption. In 2010, 26% of the total water consumption in the semi-arid region served the production of crops for export to other regions within Iran (mainly cereals) or abroad (mainly fruits and nuts). Iran’s interprovincial virtual water trade grew by a factor of 1.6, which was mainly due to increased interprovincial trade in cereals, nuts, and fruits. Current Iranian food and water policy could be enriched by reducing the WFs of crop production to certain benchmark levels per crop and climatic region and aligning cropping patterns to spatial differences in water availability and productivities, and by paying due attention to the increasing food consumption per capita in Iran.

Increasing population and income and a wheat self-sufficiency policy are already stressing Iran's strategic Karkeh River Basin. Examining three scenarios to the year 2025, the authors of this study find: (1) business as usual leads to an aggravation of groundwater overdraft and may jeopardize the ecosystem services provided by the Hawr Al Azim marsh area; (2) giving priority to environmental flow requirements and restoring groundwater tables leads to a shortfall in wheat production; but (3) reducing agricultural water demand could maintain a certain level of food production. Appropriate policy could minimize the tradeoffs between food self-sufficiency, sustainable water use and farmers' income.

This study proposes a performance appraisal framework for agricultural water distribution systems based on the Water-Food-Energy Nexus perspective. To analyze and evaluate agricultural water distribution systems with this framework, various methods of improving the operational management were developed and tested under the conventional and water shortages in operational scenarios. The Water-Food-Energy Nexus indicators were then calculated for performance appraisal of the water distribution systems in a study area, located in central Iran. The results indicated that by upgrading the manual operation to an automatic control system, gave the best results from the nexus indicators perspectives. The Bayesian Network model was used to present a probabilistic approach that could assist managers and decision-makers in evaluating the performance of the system, based on the nexus perspective. For this purpose, various configurations of the Bayesian Network structures were developed based on an export-oriented approach, and the most appropriate model was determined for the test case. The calibration and validation process of the selected configuration approved a high accuracy in fulfilling the objective of the study. The developed framework can be employed as a decision support model to prioritize options for modernizing agricultural water distribution systems.

Ensuring water, energy, and food security with minimum damage to groundwater resources is a key challenge to achieve sustainable development in arid areas. To address this scientific and policy challenge, a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM)-nonlinear programming approach is developed for informing debates over improved management of the groundwater, energy, and food nexus that optimally allocates resources to food production to improve economic benefit and control groundwater depletion. Furthermore, this approach is capable of evaluating management policies affecting resource planning at a regional level. The approach is applied to the Neishaboor basin in northeast Iran. The main results are: (i) economic profit and food production depend on groundwater availability and energy use, which raise environmental protection challenges; (ii) the solutions could be used to define optimal policy strategies for sustainable management of groundwater, energy, food, and simultaneously achieve economic and environmental goals; (iii) improved irrigation efficiency would be considered as an efficient strategy under conditions of growing water scarcity. The results of this research can inform policy makers on effective strategies for integrated groundwater, energy, and food planning.

A major water governance concern is how to coordinate the complex relationships of the water, food, and energy sectors and the resulting economic, social, and environmental consequences. Focusing on the challenges in one sector (e.g. water shortage in the water sector) and making decisions without considering other sectors will not solve these problems; rather, it will create a new problem (the decline of food production) in the food sectors. The nexus approach is a novel method to represent the interrelated challenges of the water, food, and energy sectors by considering the sectors’ policies to achieve sustainable development. The present study analyzes the social network of nexus actors in the Yazd-Ardakan aquifer, Yazd province, Iran. For this purpose, 54 partners in the nexus network were first identified in various public, private, semi-private and non-governmental organizations. Three types of interactions (knowledge and information exchange, budget transfer, and collaboration) were analyzed among the actors. The actor-network was, then, assessed at the levels of the entire network and individual actors. Then, a coherence analysis was performed by the density index at the entire network level, and the power analysis was carried out using in-degree, out-degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centrality indices at the individual actor level. Social network analysis criteria were, then, incorporated with the multi-criteria decision-making model ELECTRE I to select the key and powerful actors in the nexus network. Next, the powerful actors were identified and introduced with respect to 15 criteria employed in the social network analysis. According to the results, the power structure in the nexus network of the research area is not at equilibrium. Most of the power lies with the public sector. The water, food, and energy sectors act alone and they do not exploit their maximum organizational capacities to establish relationships with one another.