Afghanistan is a headwater state that contributes supplies to several countries in Central and South Asia. However, despite being a water source, it faces the challenge of establishing its own storage infrastructure and water-sharing methods to protect its food security. This article investigates impacts on the Afghan agricultural sector resulting from enhanced reservoir storage capacity and better-performing water-sharing methods. An integrated systems analysis is formulated to analyze the economic performance of both interventions. Results reveal that both interventions show the highest capacity to improve food security in conditions where water supply shows the greatest natural fluctuations.

PR | IFPRI3; ISI; PSSP; CRP2; E Building Resilience | EPTD; PIM | CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Urban areas are considered net consumers of materials and energy, attracting these from the surrounding hinterland and other parts of the planet. The way these flows are transformed and returned to the environment by the city is important for addressing questions of sustainability and the effect of human behavior on the metabolism of the city. The present work explores these questions with the use of systems analysis, specifically in the form of a Multi-sectoral Systems Analysis (MSA), a tool for research and for supporting decision-making for policy and investment. The application of MSA is illustrated in the context of Greater London, with these three objectives: (a) estimating resource fluxes (nutrients, water and energy) entering, leaving and circulating within the city-watershed system; (b) revealing the synergies and antagonisms resulting from various combinations of water-sector innovations; and (c) estimating the economic benefits associated with implementing these technologies, from the point of view of production of fertilizer and energy, and the reduction of greenhouse gases. Results show that the selection of the best technological innovation depends on which resource is the focus for improvement. Urine separation can potentially recover 47% of the nitrogen in the food consumed in London, with revenue of $33 M per annum from fertilizer production. Collecting food waste in sewers together with growing algae in wastewater treatment plants could beneficially increase the amount of carbon release from renewable energy by 66%, with potential annual revenues of $58 M from fuel production.

In this study, we focus on water quality as a vehicle to illustrate the role that the water, energy, and food (WEF) Nexus perspective may have in promoting ecosystem services in agriculture. The mediation of water quality by terrestrial systems is a key ecosystem service for a range of actors (municipalities, fishers, industries, and energy providers) and is reshaped radically by agricultural activity. To address these impacts, many programs exist to promote improved land-use practices in agriculture; however, where these practices incur a cost or other burden to the farmer, adoption can be low unless some form of incentive is provided (as in a payment for ecosystem services (PES) program). Provision of such incentives can be a challenge to sustain in the long term, if there is not a clear beneficiary or other actor willing to provide them. Successfully closing the loop between impacts and incentives often requires identifying a measurable and valuable service with a clear central beneficiary that is impacted by the summative effects of the diffuse agricultural practices across the landscape. Drawing on cases from our own research, we demonstrate how the WEF Nexus perspective—by integrating non-point-source agricultural problems under well-defined energy issues—can highlight central beneficiaries of improved agricultural practice, where none may have existed otherwise.

In recent years, the notion of a nexus involving water, energy, and food has been gaining attention in the scholarly literature and popular press, due partly to the impetus provided by an international conference on the nexus in 2011, and partly to the increasing interest among researchers and public officials in determining the investments and policies needed to achieve and sustain water, energy, and food security. While the notion of such a nexus is compelling to some observers, interactions involving water, energy, and food have been known and studied for many years by scientists and policy analysts. The need for greater integration of research and policy discourse across sectors and regions has been expressed in international meetings since the late 1940s. In addition, the conceptual basis for including water, energy, and food in the “nexus,” to the exclusion of other resources and inputs is not evident. In many cases, the information excluded from studies claiming to implement a nexus approach might be of greater importance to science and policy than the information included in the analysis. In this paper, I review some of the experience gained in earlier attempts to enhance integration and policy coherence, and to promote systems analysis. The challenges observed in implementing programs of integrated natural resources management (INRM) and integrated water resources management (IWRM), in particular, suggest that efforts to implement a water-energy-food nexus approach will not enhance the policy process in all settings. In sum, it is not clear that the increasing attention given to studies claiming to implement a nexus approach is warranted.

In the meat industry there are some processes like drying or storage of salted meat products in which the knowledge of water sorption phenomena in salted proteins could be very useful. The sorption and desorption of most salted products is a singular process with three differentiated steps: a(w) < 0.75, a(w) = 0.75 and a(w) > 0.75. SAFES methodology allows the analysis of different elements in a system: the components, phases and states of aggregation in the food during the process to understand the process stages with a suitable level of complexity. It also analyzes the transport functions, chemical reactions and the phenomena occurring during the processing of the product. The aim of this paper is to analyze the sorption phenomena of water in salted proteins using the SAFES methodology for the three different steps of the water desorption process. Salted pork meat isotherms at different three different salt concentrations and three various temperatures were analyzed in order to observe differences between them, in terms of mass transport, reactions, etc. With SAFES methodology, differences in the behaviour of the system, depending on the amount of NaCl added to the pork meat were observed. Differences in mass fluxes were found in relation to temperature and NaCl concentration.

International audience | Smallholder farmers, who mostly engage in low-value agriculture in the drylands of Northern Africa, were the first to have felt the effects of climate change, with threats to their livelihoods and food security. The increasing costs of agricultural production, poor water and energy infrastructure, loss of agricultural land due to urban expansion, fragmented resource management, and unsustainable management practices all contribute to this vulnerability to climate change. This highlights the urgent need for innovative practices in farming systems. Within the framework of the water-energy-foodecosystem nexus, this paper explores innovative practices in dryland farming systems, by assessing their impact on water, energy, food, and ecosystem through stakeholder perception. In this work, we aim to present a systems approach for assessing the resilience of the water-energy-food-ecosystem nexus in arid and semiarid regions. By using a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) approach, the study-which focuses on the Fès-Meknès region in Morocco-involves local actors to help researchers identify the key variables in order to assist farmers in their adaptation to climate change. The findings revealed different priorities between farmers and other stakeholders regarding the adoption of agricultural innovations. Farmers prioritize innovations that guarantee higher profitability and more market opportunities, such as integrating olive trees with cereal crops, by highlighting the importance of sustainable income sources. Meanwhile, stakeholders, such as researchers, engineers, government officials, and agribusiness entrepreneurs, prioritize innovations that emphasize high water use efficiency, which is crucial for the resilience of dryland farming areas: for instance, rainwater harvesting or the use of drought-resistant crop varieties that directly address the need for water conservation. But in doing so they are overlooking broader aspects within the water-energy-food-ecosystem nexus.

The concept of the Water&#8315;Energy&#8315;Food nexus (WEF), as documented by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), suggests that the three resources are thoroughly interrelated, shaping a complicated web of interlinkages. Perceiving the three commodities as an interdependent variable system, rather than isolated subsystems is a step towards a more holistic approach, and thus a prerequisite to introducing a sustainable scheme for better managing resources. In this work, the well-documented WEF nexus is broadened to a five-dimensional nexus, also involving land use and climate. A methodology for drawing the interrelations among the five dimensions and unreeling the complicated system of direct and indirect interlinkages is given. The intensity of interlinkages among nexus components is initially assessed through a three-point typology with interlinkage scoring corresponding to resource use in Greece. The typology is used and is further expanded to quantify successfully all interlinkages among nexus components with a proposed heuristic algorithm. Results are used to create the cross-interlinkage matrix that identifies food as the most influencing resource and water as the resource mostly influenced by other nexus elements. Results show that indirect interlinkages of multiple resources can be very significant and should not be ignored when planning nexus-coherent policy initiatives and investments in different sectors, in order to promote resource efficiency.