Water-energy-food nexus approach at the core of businesses – How businesses in the bioenergy sector in Brazil are responding to integrated challenges?

Benites Lazaro, Lira Luz; Giatti, Leandro Luiz; Puppim de Oliveira, José Antonio

Water-energy-food nexus approach at the core of businesses – How businesses in the bioenergy sector in Brazil are responding to integrated challenges?

2021

Benites Lazaro, Lira Luz | Giatti, Leandro Luiz | Puppim de Oliveira, José Antonio

The management of water-energy-food nexus lies at the heart of the nexus approach, addressing the trade-offs and externalities across these three components while focusing on system efficiency instead of isolated sectoral productivity. This latter approach posits that there is no possible isolated efficiency and that decision-making based on classic management theories needs to change. This study examines whether the nexus approach is embedded into business sustainable initiatives, and suggests ways to improve the judicious use of water, soil/land, energy, and healthy food production. We use the latent Dirichlet allocation method to analyze the sustainability reports of Brazil’s largest bioenergy companies and documents from the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association from 2007 to 2020 in order to understand the response of these companies to nexus integration challenges. Despite efforts by bioenergy firms to minimize the impacts of their production processes, our results show that the nexus thinking is overlooked in many aspects, such as food security, water scarcity and working conditions. Furthermore, policies and decisions that appear to incentivize sustainability in one sector, such as energy, may lead to unintended oversights in others. Management could be improved by implementing nexus thinking that considers integrated governance between the different sectors involved in the production of bioenergy.

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