To achieve a sustainable supply and effectively manage water, energy and food (WEF) demand, interactions between WEF need to be understood. This study developed an integrated model, capturing the interactions between WEF at end-use level at a household scale. The model is based on a survey of 419 households conducted to investigate WEF over winter and summer for the city of Duhok, Iraq. A bottom-up approach was used to develop this system dynamics-based model. The model estimates WEF demand and the generated organic waste and wastewater quantities. It also investigates the impact of change in user behaviour, diet, income, family size and climate.The simulation results show a good agreement with the historical data. Using the model, the impact of Global Scenario Group (GSG) scenarios was investigated. The results suggest that the ‘fortress world’ scenario (an authoritarian response to the threat of breakdown) had the highest impact on WEF.

Glyphosate is used widely to control weeds. Glyphosate is a broad spectrum, non-selective, systemic and post-emergent herbicide. Glyphosate excessive use and impact on the environment is promoting the analysis of glyphosate in water, soil and food materials. Methods to analyse glyphosate at low levels are needed because glyphosate has a short half-life due to easy microbial degradation. Glyphosate has a high polarity and solubility in water, has high binding affinity with soil and is non-volatile. The absence of chromophoric groups in the molecular structure makes the detection difficult. Therefore, detection can be achieved by derivatisation, which makes glyphosate more volatile and stable for spectroscopic analysis. Derivatisation is commonly done by alkyl chloroformates, acylating agents, 9-fluoroenylmethylchloroformate, 4-methoxybenzenesulfonylfluoride and o-phthalaldehyde. Immunosensors allow detection at microlevels. Nanocrystals and nanotechnology allow detection at nanolevels. Here, we review methods to derivatise and analyse glyphosate.

Human activities are increasingly leading to overuse of surface water and nonrenewable groundwater, challenging the capacity of water resources to ensure food security and continuous growth of the economy. Adaptation policies targeting specifically water security can easily overlook its interaction with other sustainability metrics and unanticipated local responses to the larger-scale policy interventions. Using a recently developed global partial equilibrium, grid-resolving model, nick-named SIMPLE-on-a-Grid and coupling it with the global Water Balance Model, we simulate the impacts of reducing unsustainable irrigation water withdrawals on land use change and food supply, under a variety of future (2050) scenarios with and without adaptations. Comparisons are made among three policy interventions: inter-basin water transfers, investments in agricultural productivity-enhancing technologies, and the promotion of virtual water trade. Although each of these scenarios affects regional food supply in a similar fashion, their implications for land cover change, carbon emissions and global food security are quite different. By allowing for a systematic comparison of these alternative adaptations to future scarcity, the global gridded modeling approach offers unique insights into the multiscale nature of the water scarcity challenge.

To explore the perceptions of food access by African American women in Flint, MI.Using womanist theory, in which African American women's experiential knowledge centered the analysis, 8 focus groups were conducted during fall/spring, 2014–2015. Seventeen mothers aged 21–50 years with children aged <18 years and 13 women aged >60 years comprised the groups.The high cost of water, poor availability of healthy foods in inner-city stores, and limited transportation were barriers to accessing healthy food. Conversely, receiving food from food giveaways, friends, and family, as well as access to transportation facilitated food access. These women also reported discriminatory experiences and diet-related health concerns. Participants were keenly aware of available free community resources and gender, racial, and income barriers to accessing them.Understanding these barriers and facilitators provides information to aid local food policy assistance decisions and inform community-based interventions, especially given the lead contamination of water and the purported importance of a healthy diet to sequester lead.

The sustainability of food production systems is inherently linked with energy, water and food (EWF) resources directly and in-directly throughout their lifecycle. The understanding of the interdependencies between the three resource sectors in the context of food production can provide a measurable account for resource requirements, while meeting food security objectives. The energy, water and food Nexus tool developed by the authors has been designed to model the inter-dependency between energy, water and food resources, whilst conducting an environmental assessment of product systems. With emphasis on the inter-linkages between EWF resources, the tool quantifies material flows, natural resource and energy consumption at component unit process level. This work integrates greenhouse gas control and waste to power technologies within the energy, water and food Nexus tool and evaluates the environmental impact of a hypothetical food product system designed to deliver a perceived level of food self-sufficiency (40%) for the State of Qatar. Multiple system configurations, representative of different pathways for the delivery of consistent food products are evaluated, transforming a once linear product system into a circular design. The sub-systems added consist of a biomass integrated gasification combined cycle which recycles solid waste into useful forms of energy that can be re-used within the nexus. In addition, a carbon capture sub-system is integrated to capture and recycle CO2 from both the fossil fuel powered and the biomass integrated gasification combined cycle energy sub-systems. The integration of carbon capture with the biomass integrated gasification combined cycle transforms the carbon neutral biomass integrated gasification combined cycle process to a negative greenhouse gas emission technology known as bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. For the different scenarios and sub-system configurations considered, the global warming potential can be theoretically balanced (reduced by ∼98%) through the integration of photovoltaics, biomass integrated gasification combined cycle and carbon capture technologies. The peak global warming potential, i.e. a fully fossil fuel dependent system, is recorded at 1.73 × 10⁹ kg CO2 eq./year whilst the lowest achievable global warming potential is 2.18 × 10⁷ kg CO2 eq./year when utilising a combination of photovoltaics, carbon capture integrated with combined cycle gas turbine in addition to the integrated negative emission achieving system. The natural gas consumption is reduced by 7.8 × 10⁷ kg/year in the best case configuration, achieving a credit. In the same scenario, the photovoltaics land footprint required is calculated to a maximum of 660 ha. The maximum theoretically achievable negative emission is 1.09 × 10⁹ kg CO2/year.

This study proposes a novel monitoring tool based on Satellite Remote Sensing (SRS) data to examine the status of water distribution and Water Use Efficiency (WUE) under changing water policies in large-scale and complex irrigation schemes. The aim is to improve our understanding of the water-food nexus in such schemes. With a special reference to the Gezira Irrigation Scheme (GeIS) in Sudan during the period 2000–2014, the tool devised herein is well suited for cases where validation data are absent. First, it introduces an index, referred to as the Crop Water Consumption Index (CWCI), to assess the efficiency of water policies. The index is defined as the ratio of actual evapotranspiration (ETa) over agricultural areas to total ETa for the whole scheme where ETa is estimated using the Simplified Surface Energy Balance model (SSEB). Second, the tool uses integrated Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (iNDVI), as a proxy for crop productivity, and ETa to assess the WUE. Third, the tool uses SSEB ETa and NDVI in an attempt to detect wastage of water. Four key results emerged from this research as follows: 1) the WUE has not improved despite the changing agricultural and water policies, 2) the seasonal ETa can be used to detect the drier areas of GeIS, i.e. areas with poor irrigation water supply, 3) the decreasing trends of CWCI, slope of iNDVI-ETa linear regression and iNDVI are indicative of inefficient utilization of irrigation water in the scheme, and 4) it is possible to use SSEB ETa and NDVI to identify channels with spillover problems and detect wastage of rainwater that is not used as a source for irrigation. In conclusion, the innovative tool developed herein has provided important information on the efficiency of a large-scale irrigation scheme to help rationalize laborious water management processes and increase productivity.

This study explores the connectivity of upland farmers and downstream fishers through interlinkages of water, energy and food within the Dampalit sub-watershed of Laguna Lake, Philippines.The aim of the study is to yield policy relevant results to improve the status of the water resources and food products and to reduce possible user conflicts. Surveying 176 households mainly in the mid- and downstream areas elements and interlinkages of the local Water-Energy-Food Nexus (WEF-Nexus) were identified by the five capitals of the sustainable livelihood approach through a socio-ecological network analysis.Besides the innovative methodology, this research adds to the underserved local perspective in the WEF-Nexus research. The survey shows different livelihood profiles for the two groups and a lack of direct social links between them in the WEF-Nexus context. Also indirect links through consumption of the other group’s food products could not be identified. However, a large fraction of the population share the use of char coal for cooking, the Makiling groundwater for drinking and various household purposes and the Central Market in Los Banos for their food supply.

The increasing pressure from the world’s population on limited natural resources has reached an urgent level. The global demand for water, food, and energy is unsustainable, and poses a threat to human health, political stability, and environmental well-being. The poor in developing countries are most vulnerable to the negative effects of the exploitation of constrained resources, and the segregation of development programs by sector means that policy interventions do little to help. Currently, development policies are created in isolation from one another, within their own sectoral realms, and inter-sector coordination is rare. Policy interventions that affect more than one sector are key to holistic, sustainable development, but because they face an ownership issue, not falling under any one sector’s jurisdiction, they often go unaddressed. The alternative to the status quo is the use of a nexus perspective, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of sectors and seeks to implement policy interventions with the best net outcomes. Policy makers are encouraged to adopt “systems thinking”, to resist over-focused investments and interventions, and to seek regulatory cooperation. The body of nexus literature is growing mainly with the establishment of theoretical frameworks and macroeconomic studies that model outcomes of nexus interventions. This thesis contributes to the pool of nexus literature with microeconomic studies that are evaluated from the perspective of the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus. Microeconomic analysis is valuable to the nexus perspective not only because it informs macroeconomic models, but also because it provides empirical evidence of nexus forces at work. The subjects of the three studies contained in this thesis are smallholder farmers in Dedza, Malawi. The first study investigates the farmers’ willingness to invest in communally-owned irrigation schemes and the household socioeconomic characteristics that determine that willingness. The study is intended to inform Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) programs, to help smooth the process of the transfer of irrigation scheme ownership from the government to local stakeholders. The promotion of IMT programs is considered a FEW nexus intervention because irrigation affects not only the water sector, but also the energy and food sectors. The second study in this thesis elicits smallholder farmers’ preferences for a conditional cash transfer (CCT) over a fertilizer subsidy coupon, with the intent of presenting policy makers with an alternative to Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP). The narrow focus of the FISP, combined with its astronomical budget and disputed impact, indicate that it is time for an alternative, nexus-oriented intervention. The conditionality of a CCT means it can be targeted directly at certain sectors, and because beneficiaries are free to spend the cash as they choose, the impact will be spread over all three sectors. The third study in this thesis explores smallholder farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for improved cookstoves (ICS) and the socioeconomic characteristics that determine their WTP, to assist ICS promoting programs with pricing and targeting. Widespread sustained ICS adoption and the resulting fuel savings would directly affect the food and energy sectors, and indirectly affect the water sector. The high morbidity rates caused by reliance on biomass fuels for cooking would decline with sustained ICS adoption and proper use, resulting in human health improvements that would affect all three nodes of the nexus. There would be further indirect effects on all three sectors resulting from advancements in gender equality and climate change mitigation. While the findings of these studies have interesting implications for the FEW nexus, the interventions in question should be applied in an economy-wide model to determine the nexus effects. Such coordination of micro- and macroeconomic research, coupled with the inter-sector perspective, characterize the nexus approach and the future of development policy. | Der zunehmende Bevölkerungsdruck auf begrenzte natürliche Ressourcen hat ein kritisches Niveau erreicht. Der globale Bedarf an Wasser, Nahrungsmitteln und Energie ist nicht nachhaltig und stellt eine Bedrohung für die menschliche Gesundheit, die politische Stabilität und die Umwelt dar. Arme in Entwicklungsländern sind am stärksten von negativen Auswirkungen der Ausbeutung von begrenzten Ressourcen betroffen. Die Trennung von Entwicklungsprogrammen nach Sektoren führt dazu, dass politische Interventionen wenig zur Lösung dieses Problems beitragen. Derzeit werden entwicklungspolitische Maßnahmen isoliert voneinander, innerhalb ihrer eigenen Sektoren geschaffen, und es gibt wenig Koordination zwischen den Sektoren. Sektorübergreifende politische Maßnahmen sind unablässig für eine ganzheitliche, nachhaltige Entwicklung, doch weil sie nicht unter die Zuständigkeit eines einzelnen Sektors fallen und Verantwortlichkeiten nicht klar sind, werden sie oft nicht durchgeführt. Die Alternative zum Status Quo ist die Verwendung einer Nexus-Perspektive, die die Vernetzung von Sektoren unterstreicht und politische Interventionen mit den besten Nettowirkungen umsetzt. Politische Entscheidungsträger werden dazu aufgefordert "systemisch“ zu denken, thematisch zu sehr fokussierten Investitionen und Interventionen zu widerstehen und regulatorische Zusammenarbeit zu suchen. Die Literatur zum Nexus wächst vor allem mit der Etablierung von theoretischen Bezugsrahmen sowie makroökonomische Studien, die Ergebnisse von Nexus-Interventionen modellieren. Die vorliegende Arbeit leistet einen Beitrag zur Nexus-Literatur mit mikroökonomischen Studien, die aus der Perspektive des Nexus Nahrung-Energie-Wasser (FEW) ausgewertet werden. Eine mikroökonomische Analyse ist für die Nexusperspektive nicht nur deshalb wertvoll, weil sie Daten für makroökonomische Modelle, sondern auch, weil sie empirische Beweise für Nexus-Kräfte liefert. Gegenstand der drei Studien in der vorliegenden Arbeit sind Kleinbauern in Dedza, Malawi. Die erste Studie untersucht die Bereitschaft der Landwirte, in gemeinschaftlich genutzte Bewässerungsprogramme zu investieren sowie die sozioökonomischen Charakteristiken der Haushalte, die diese Bereitschaft bestimmen. Die Studie soll den Prozess der Übertragung von Projektverantwortung für das Bewässerungsmanagement-Transferprogramm (IMT) von der Regierung zu lokalen Stakeholdern erleichtern. Die Förderung von IMT-Programmen gilt als FEW-Nexus-Intervention, da Bewässerung nicht nur den Wasser-, sondern auch den Energie- und Nahrungsmittelsektor betrifft. Während Bewässerung in der Landwirtschaft den Wassersektor negativ beeinflussen und das Wasserkraftpotenzial im Energiesektor verringern kann, kann mit einer weiteren Übernahme von Bewässerung gerechnet werden, die Erträge und somit Ernährungssicherheit verbessert. Die zweite Studie in dieser Arbeit untersucht die Präferenzen von Kleinbauern für ein Geldtransferprogramm (CCT) sowie Düngergutscheinen. Ziel dieser Studie ist es, politischen Entscheidungsträgern in Malawi eine Alternative zum Düngersubventionsprogramm (FISP) zu präsentieren. Der enge Fokus des FISP, das beträchtliche Budget und umstrittene Auswirkungen deuten auf die Notwendigkeit einer alternativen, nexusorientierten Intervention hin. Die Konditionalität eines CCT bedeutet, dass es direkt auf bestimmte Sektoren ausgerichtet werden kann und weil die Begünstigten frei entscheiden, wofür sie das Geld ausgeben, werden die Auswirkungen auf alle Sektoren verteilt. Die dritte Studie untersucht die Zahlungsbereitschaft(WTP) von Kleinbauern für verbesserte Kochherde (ICS) und die sozioökonomischen Merkmale, die die WTP bestimmen, mit dem Ziel, die Förderung von ICS-Programmen mit Preisgestaltung und Targeting zu unterstützen. Eine nachhaltige Verbreitung von verbesserten Kochherden und die daraus resultierenden Treibstoffeinsparungen würden Nahrungsmittel- und Energiesektor direkt und den Wassersektor indirekt beeinflussen. Die hohen Morbiditätsraten, die durch die Abhängigkeit von Biomasse zum Kochen verursacht werden, würden mit anhaltender ICS-Übernahme und korrektem Gebrauch sinken, was zu Verbesserungen der menschlichen Gesundheit führt, die alle drei Nexusknoten betreffen. Es gibt weitere indirekte Auswirkungen auf alle drei Sektoren, die sich aus Fortschritten bei der Gleichstellung der Geschlechter und dem Klimaschutz ergeben. Während die Ergebnisse dieser Untersuchungen interessante Implikationen für den FEW-Nexus haben, sollten die betreffenden Interventionen in einem gesamtwirtschaftlichen Modell angewendet werden, um die Nexus-Effekte zu bestimmen. Diese Koordination mikro- und makroökonomischer Forschung gepaart mit einer sektorübergreifenden Perspektive kennzeichnet den Nexusansatz sowie die Zukunft von Entwicklungspolitik.