Water-Food-Energy (WFE) resources exert mutual influences upon each other and thus cannot be managed separately. Information on household WFE expenditures addresses knowledge that distinguishes between geospatial districts' social welfare. Social welfare and investment in districts' WFE resources are interconnected. District (node) product of WFE normalized expenditures (Volume) is considered as a representative WFE Nexus holistic quantity. This Volume is assumed to be a function of residents' knowledge of welfare level across districts. We prove that the Volume rate conforms to Boltzmann entropy, and this is the premise of our hypothesis for directed information from high to low welfare between network nodes. Welfare mass (WM) represents the district's Volume combined with its income and population density. This WM is used as input into a model balancing between all domain nodes that allows policymakers to simulate the effects of potential quantifiable policy decisions targeted to individual districts at a domain level while also considering influences between districts. Based on existing historic data, the established tool exemplifies its potential by providing outcomes for Israel districts showing the influence of imposing different temporal allocation/deallocation actions as managerial regulations to prescribed districts. It is found that districts with a high WM do not suffer when a defund is applied, but districts that have a low WM gain from subsidies.

Extant studies address water, food, and health security issues considerably separately and within narrow disciplinary confines. This study investigates the links among these three issues from an ecological viewpoint with a multidisciplinary approach in a modified Millennium Ecosystem Assessment framework developed by the United Nations. The modified framework includes water, food, and health security considerations as the three constituents of human well-being from an ecological (more specifically, ecosystem services) viewpoint. This study examines the links through published data associated with the Minamata incident, which was a historic and horrific methylmercury-induced water, food, and health poisoning crisis in Japan. The results show that when heavy metal pollution changes one component (marine water) of the provisioning ecosystem services, this change subsequently affects another component (seafood) of the services. This then defines the linkages among water, food, and health security as the three constituents of human well-being within the modified framework. The links can have immediate and far-reaching economic, social, legal, ethical, and justice implications within and across generations. This study provides important evidence for emerging economies that ignore the water–food–health security nexus.

Water, energy, and food are essential and strategic resources for human well-being and socio-economic development and form the water-energy-food (WEF) system with competition and synergy. The competitive and synergistic evolution model was developed to remedy the limitations in quantitatively analyzing the tradeoffs and synergies of the WEF system. Firstly, an assessment model was developed for measuring the synergy and competition of the WEF system based on the order degree of each subsystem (That is, the development degree of each subsystem) and synergy theory. Then the synergy evolution model (SEM), with the help of a logistic model and accelerated genetic algorithm (AGA) model, was developed to measure and identify the steady-state. Furthermore, an empirical study was conducted with 30 provinces in China as examples. The results indicated that the food subsystem had the highest average order degree (0.347), followed by the energy subsystem (0.305), and the water subsystem had the lowest (0.281). The degree of order of the three subsystems exhibited an upward trend in time and has differences in the spatial distribution. Also, the results showed that synergistic, restrictive, and competitive relationships exist within the WEF system. Areas with competitive and restrictive relationships are mainly located in South China and North China, respectively, within the relationship between the water and energy subsystems. The entire country showed a restrictive relationship between the water and food subsystems. The energy and food subsystems showed that the eastern regions with relationship, while the western regions with competitive and restrictive relationship. Finally, effective measures (e.g., optimize the industrial structure, continuing to implement the strategy of “storing grain in the land and technology”, and to hold the arable land minimum) are suggested to achieve the WEF system coordinated and sustainable development. We believe that the assessment model is also applicable to assess the other complex and dynamic system worldwide that involve multiple factors.

Delivering access to sufficient food, energy and water resources to ensure human wellbeing is a major concern for governments worldwide. However, it is crucial to account for the ‘nexus’ of interactions between these natural resources and the consequent implications for human wellbeing. The private sector has a critical role in driving positive change towards more sustainable nexus management and could reap considerable benefits from collaboration with researchers to devise solutions to some of the foremost sustainability challenges of today. Yet opportunities are missed because the private sector is rarely involved in the formulation of deliverable research priorities. We convened senior research scientists and influential business leaders to collaboratively identify the top forty questions that, if answered, would best help companies understand and manage their food-energy-water-environment nexus dependencies and impacts. Codification of the top order nexus themes highlighted research priorities around development of pragmatic yet credible tools that allow businesses to incorporate nexus interactions into their decision-making; demonstration of the business case for more sustainable nexus management; identification of the most effective levers for behaviour change; and understanding incentives or circumstances that allow individuals and businesses to take a leadership stance. Greater investment in the complex but productive relations between the private sector and research community will create deeper and more meaningful collaboration and cooperation.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) take the global challenges into a new phase, calling for reasonable resources management from holistic perspectives. This study develops a novel integrated modelling framework for sustainable agricultural energy-water-food nexus (EWFN) management, with the objectives of maximum social welfare of water resources allocation, maximum hydroelectric generation, maximum grain crop production, maximum positive farmland ecosystem service value, and minimum negative farmland ecosystem service value. The proposed framework is capable of: (1) balancing benefit efficiency and allocation equity using social welfare function; (2) reconciling conflicting targets among socio-economic, resource, and eco-environmental spheres; (3) generating sustainable water and land resources allocation strategies considering complex and uncertain environment. The proposed model was applied to the Zhanghe Reservoir irrigation area, central China. Flexible water and land resources allocation schemes among different sectors, crops, and periods were generated, as well as managerial insights into what efforts should be done were provided for decision-makers. After optimization, efficiency-equity tradeoff was balanced with social welfare index reaching [0.94, 0.99]. Optima results show that GHGs emission contributed majority of the total loss, which cannot be totally neutralized by carbon sequestration, causing negative eco-environmental impacts of [2.3, 3.4] × 10⁸ CNY. The proposed model performs well on generating robust and coordinated solutions according to scenarios analysis and models comparison. The proposed approach has potential on achieving SDGs in agricultural EWFN system, and is portable to other agriculture-centered areas suffering from similar resources crisis.

Water, energy, and food are the most basic and essential sectors for human welfare. However, an inextricable nexus and competition exists among these sectors. Production of molasses-based bioethanol is an interesting case resulting in the production of different food and energy materials while consuming water, energy, land, and other raw materials, throughout its life cycle. This paper briefly describes the nexus among water, energy, and food for bioethanol in Pakistan and its environmental implications. A life cycle approach has been used for evaluating four footprint categories including the carbon, ecological, water scarcity, and energy footprints along with an energy analysis of bioethanol. In comparison to conventional gasoline, bioethanol would have benefits in terms of lesser greenhouse gas emissions, better use of productive land, and superior energy performance, but, this will be at the expense of higher impacts in terms of water scarcity. Therefore, considering only a single aspect could result in inadvertent trade-offs that may go unnoticed. The quantified values would help accomplish integrated resource management along with their utilization within limits so as to be available for other uses. This study could help in developing strategies for optimal management of resources to maximize the synergies and minimize the possible trade-offs.