The increasing global demand for natural rubber (100% increase in the last 15 years) is for most part met by Malaysia and Indonesia, and – to a lesser extent – other countries in South-East Asia and Africa. The consequent expansion of rubber plantation has often occurred at the expenses of agricultural land for staple crops, particularly in South-East Asia, where 90% of the land suitable for agriculture is already under cultivation. Here we investigate the extent to which the ongoing increase in rubber production is competing with the food system and affecting the livelihoods of rural communities living in the production areas and their appropriation of natural resources, such as water. We also investigate to what extent the expansion of rubber plantations is taking place through large scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and evaluate the impacts on rural communities. Our results show how rubber production needs more than 10 million ha of fertile land and up to 136–149 × 10⁹ m³ y⁻¹ of freshwater (125 × 10⁹ m³ y⁻¹ of green water and 11–24 × 10⁹ m³ y⁻¹ of blue water). These resources would be sufficient to produce enough food to significantly reduce malnourishment in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam if replaced by rice production. Overall, natural rubber production has important environmental, social, and economic impacts. Indeed, despite their ability to bring employment and increase the average income of economically disadvantaged areas, rubber plantations may threaten the local water and food security and induce a loss of rural livelihoods – particularly when the new plantations result from LSLAs that displace semi-subsistence forms of production – thereby forcing the local populations to depend on global food markets.

The world economy is under pressure for greater, more efficient and more sustainable use of natural resources to meet complementary and competing objectives in the food, water and energy sectors. Interactions between these three sectors have become increasingly affected by the bioeconomy—a concept that encompasses economic growth driven by the development of renewable biological resources and biotechnologies to produce sustainable products, employment and income. This article explores how water and the bioeconomy are interlinked, including how the constraints from growing water scarcity—in part caused by development of the bioeconomy—may influence bioeconomic growth. The article describes the impact of biofuel production on water quantity and quality and examines the potential for improved water use through the development of crop biotechnology and improved crop management. Then alternative scenarios for water in the bioeconomy are assessed, and policy conclusions are presented.

The institutional reform of the State established in Ecuador during the last decade has aimed at regaining control of specific sectors such as the consumptive use of water. Since 2014, regulation, consumption, and use of water, especially in agriculture, have been analyzed through policies and fiscal instruments. This research presents itself in the context of the simulation of scenarios using positive mathematical programming, to analyze the economic impact of pricing policies on agro-food farms. Policies of fixed costs, water blocks, and volumetric prices are evaluated. The results show that the existing fixed costs do not reduce water consumption. In contrast, the scenarios of water blocks and volumetric prices impact on the behavior of farmers. The tendency of water consumption to the application of volumetric prices demonstrates that banana farms have a greater tolerance to the increase of water costs. On the other hand, the response to an increase in cost in the case of cacao, sugar cane, and rice depends on the productivity of farmers. The negative effects can lead to the abandonment of agriculture. Thus, volumetric policies are more efficient in reducing water consumption as well as in recovering the costs of the irrigation system.

The scarcity of grazing and water for an animal has a negative effect on household welfare and food security either by affecting livestock production directly, affecting crop or off-farm income due to labor reallocation or through its direct impact on time leisure consumption.The economic impacts of resource (grazing and water) scarcity on welfare are undermined. Thus, a better understanding that is derived from the factual evidence is required. The first objective of this paper is to explore the link between natural resource scarcity and per capita food consumption expenditure (PCFE) as proxy for welfare and food security followed by the second objective of analyzing whether this effect is uniform across all quantile groups and there is gender differential effect using distance and shadow price as resource scarcity indicators. The paper used a relatively unique data set from a randomly drawn 518 sample farmers in Northern Ethiopia. To address our first objective, we employ the IV two-stage least square estimation for welfare and probit model for food security drawing on non-separable farm household model.Our estimates show that about 48% of the households were food secure while 52% were food insecure. Our results confirmed the theoretical prediction that resource scarcity affects household PCFE and food security adversely as predicted by the downward spiral hypothesis. The results indicate that animal feed and water scarcity have an important impact on welfare and food security. As expected, in aggregate, reducing time spent searching for water per day leads to an increase in PCFE and food security. Similarly, a decrease in time wastage for searching grazing increase PCFE and food security respectively, and an increment of PCFE and food security is achieved by a reduction in crop residue transporting time per day.The gender differential analysis signals that increasing resource scarcity results in low PCFE and food security, with the male are considerably likely to have less food consumption expenditure and being food insecure more as compared to female households. The total impact of time spent searching for water, grazing, and transporting straw on per PCFE is − 0.142%, − 0.102%, and − 0.092%, respectively, and decreasing reaching time to a water, grazing, and straw source by 0.6 min will increase PCFE by 354 ETB, 254 ETB, and 229 ETB for the median household. Depending on results from the quantile regression, the effect of water and feed scarcity is not uniform across the food consumption distribution.

Humanity’s future sustainable supply of energy, fuels and materials is aiming towards renewable sources such as biomass. Several studies on biomass value chains (BVCs) have demonstrated the feasibility of biomass in replacing fossil fuels. However, many of the activities along the chain can disrupt the food–energy–water (FEW) nexus given that these resource systems have been ever more interlinked due to increased global population and urbanisation. Essentially, the design of BVCs has to integrate the systems-thinking approach of the FEW nexus; such that, existing concerns on food, water and energy security, as well as the interactions of the BVCs with the nexus, can be incorporated in future policies. To date, there has been little to no literature that captures the synergistic opportunities between BVCs and the FEW nexus. This paper presents the first survey of process systems engineering approaches for the design of BVCs, focusing on whether and how these approaches considered synergies with the FEW nexus. Among the surveyed mathematical models, the approaches include multi-stage supply chain, temporal and spatial integration, multi-objective optimisation and uncertainty-based risk management. Although the majority of current studies are more focused on the economic impacts of BVCs, the mathematical tools can be remarkably useful in addressing critical sustainability issues in BVCs. Thus, future research directions must capture the details of food–energy–water interactions with the BVCs, together with the development of more insightful multi-scale, multi-stage, multi-objective and uncertainty-based approaches.

Climate-stressed groundwater resources present a growing challenge for protecting food security and economic sustainability, notably in Small Island Developing States (SIDS). These states are some of the most vulnerable to climate stress because of their large coastlines, vulnerability to rising sea levels, weak access to reliable surface water, and limited food production capacity for handling increased groundwater scarcity. Impacts of climate stressed groundwater resources brought on by irrigation and growing urban demand in SIDS continue to receive widespread attention by both scientists and policymakers. Policies that limit pumping to protect aquifer sustainability reduce short-term economic welfare by unknown amounts that would otherwise be secured by both urban and irrigation water users. Yet, little scholarly research has addressed economic impacts of climate-water stress for the special needs of SIDS for which urban and irrigation pumping compete hydrologically and economically over long time periods. The original contribution of this work is to address that gap by employing downscaled data on precipitation from Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) climate scenarios. Its novel contribution is to conceptualize, develop, apply, and interpret an integrated hydro-economic framework to understand interconnected physical and economic linkages from managing an unconfined regional aquifer system under each of three climate and two policy scenarios. The application is to Barbados, a SIDS, for which current and future irrigation and urban demands compete for water. The framework integrates groundwater hydrology, climate scenarios, economics, land use, and groundwater management, with the intent to mitigate impacts of climate stress on current economic values of water as well as protecting future aquifer sustainability. Results provide a framework to guide water management for SIDS vulnerable to climate stress for which water of the right quantity, quality, timing, location, and price are essential elements of economic development.