This paper examines the making of urban sustainable food provisioning through the case of Barcelona. Barcelona is seeking to develop a more sustainable food system. It aims to green its municipal food markets by reducing the distances from which the food is sourced from. This has been labelled by the city of Barcelona as “proximity food”. We shed light on how, and to what extent, proximity food contributes to making the city more sustainable. To frame our analysis, we employ concepts from networks and flows as developed in sociology by Manuel Castells. We examine the provisioning processes that proximity food goes through before they enter retail markets. This includes an analysis of connections with urban energy and water flows. This so-called water, energy and food Urban Nexus, which we argue to be a key factor in the greening of urban food systems. This means that sustainability of food is not just determined by physical distances between its provisioning processes per se but by the specific ways in which food flows relate to connections (both physical and social) with energy and water.

Introduction: Implementing Integrated Water Resources Management requires balancing conflicting goals, and the effects on developing countries, which have a poor institutional capacity for change, and suggests a slower pace of integrated water resources management. The growing population of the world, especially in developing countries on one hand, and the need to provide food for this population, on the other hand, have not been the result of overreaching of resources. In this manner, the continuation of an untapped harvest of resources will endanger the sustainability of the region in the near future. Food production is largely depending on the water so that 70 to 80 percent of the water extracted from resources is consumed for irrigation, which is the reason why irrigated cultivation is regarded as inefficient consumers. Understanding how to extract, manage and consume water is the key to solve this problem. On the other hand, the health and safety of communities and agricultural production require energy. Principally in irrigation, it is not possible to extract water without consuming energy. Seeking to establish the goals of the third millennium of the United Nations, researchers have presented a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to achieve a dynamic balance in the food production and consumption of resources, most notably the approach of Water, Energy and Food (WEF) Nexus. Considering the limitation of the resources which is increasing day by day. This approach causes productivity increase by integrating water, energy and food cycles. Managing water, energy and food, despite the inherent systemic differences, are very similar, due to the close relationship between the system perspective and their interaction with each other, a new concept is now called a Nexus approach. This viewpoint describes the interconnected nature and the interplay of the three sectors.Materials and Methods: This research was carried out in Sefid-Rud dam Irrigation and Drainage Network. Sefid-Rud basin is located in the Guilan province, which is benefits from high precipitation, but factors such as dams construction in the upper reaches of the Sefid-Rud dam, the timely inconvenient precipitation and the lack of infrastructure to harvest the runoff, causes water shortages in the area. It is worth mentioning that 50% of the Guilan households have engaged in rice cultivation and more than 70% of the lands are located in the irrigation and drainage network of the Sefid-Rud dam. Hence, reducing rice cultivation in this region will have a great impact on economic and social life. Managing a Nexus approach to provide WEF security requires integrated and analytical approaches that can identify cross-sectoral exchanges, cost-effective planning, policy, and strategy management. Therefore, in this study, WEAP and LEAP software were used for managing water and food resources and managing the energy sector in Sefid-Rud irrigation and drainage network, respectively. Then, the integrated water resources management in the area was addressed by establishing a linkage between these two applications. In the first part of this study, the parameters output such as net water demand, water resources share for each demand node, unmet demand and the coverage regardless of the energy sector were compared.Results and Discussion: The results reveal that the annual water requirement of the Sefid-Rud irrigation and drainage network in 2016 with the NEXUS approach estimated about 8 million cubic meters more than the non-NEXUS approach. Agriculture is the most water-consuming node in the region and there are lots of dependencies on rice cultivation as the most water-consuming crop in the Guilan region. The next step aims to balance the supply and demand, the unmet demand at the agricultural section in the Foomanat, Central and East areas under various management scenarios. These scenarios are including dredging, increase the efficiency of transmission and distribution channels of irrigation and drainage networks, and eliminating unauthorized wells were evaluated.Conclusion: By examining the results of the applied management scenarios mentioned above, the 30% increase in the efficiency of transmission and distribution channels of irrigation and drainage networks in Sefid-Rud has the greatest impact on meeting the demand and reducing the unmet demands of triple areas. As a result of the 30% efficiency improvement scenario, decrease the agricultural demands of the Foomanat area, the central area, and the east (about 29.1, 84.5 and 62.1 million cubic meters, respectively) more than the reference scenario.

Generating strategies and techniques to feed the increasing world population is a significant challenge under climate change effects such as drought. Rural areas are especially sensitive to such effects as they are unable to overcome the lack of water with new agricultural production techniques. In developing countries, rural communities commonly do not have access to high-quality electricity supplies. In some cases, these communities lack electricity in their homes, which affects the opportunity to improve food production through the incorporation of new technologies. This work proposes an integrated optimizer based on model predictive control (MPC) that combines a water management system, which handles the medium-term water requirements for irrigation, with an energy management system, which handles short-term energy requirements. The proposed approach is based on predictive phenomenological models of evapotranspiration and electricity consumption considering climate conditions such as temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, and wind speed, and aims to optimize the use of energy and water and the relative yields of crops. The integrated energy–water management system (EWMS) improves water resource sustainability according to energy availability/costs and water use requirements. Simulation results using real data from a rural community in southern Chile show that the integrated EWMS based on an MPC optimizer successfully determines and satisfies the water and energy requirements under aquifer sustainability constraints.

A major water governance concern is how to coordinate the complex relationships of the water, food, and energy sectors and the resulting economic, social, and environmental consequences. Focusing on the challenges in one sector (e.g. water shortage in the water sector) and making decisions without considering other sectors will not solve these problems; rather, it will create a new problem (the decline of food production) in the food sectors. The nexus approach is a novel method to represent the interrelated challenges of the water, food, and energy sectors by considering the sectors’ policies to achieve sustainable development. The present study analyzes the social network of nexus actors in the Yazd-Ardakan aquifer, Yazd province, Iran. For this purpose, 54 partners in the nexus network were first identified in various public, private, semi-private and non-governmental organizations. Three types of interactions (knowledge and information exchange, budget transfer, and collaboration) were analyzed among the actors. The actor-network was, then, assessed at the levels of the entire network and individual actors. Then, a coherence analysis was performed by the density index at the entire network level, and the power analysis was carried out using in-degree, out-degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centrality indices at the individual actor level. Social network analysis criteria were, then, incorporated with the multi-criteria decision-making model ELECTRE I to select the key and powerful actors in the nexus network. Next, the powerful actors were identified and introduced with respect to 15 criteria employed in the social network analysis. According to the results, the power structure in the nexus network of the research area is not at equilibrium. Most of the power lies with the public sector. The water, food, and energy sectors act alone and they do not exploit their maximum organizational capacities to establish relationships with one another.

The big challenge of the next decades is meeting the global nutritional demand, while reducing the pressure on food resources and the GHG emissions. In this regard, the overall goal consists of redesigning the food systems and promoting sustainable dietary patterns is a crucial aspect. This article focuses on reviewing the state-of-the-art of the combined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus approach in assessing the effects of diet transitions. Diet LCAs differ in methodology, design, and assessed environmental impacts. The WEF nexus, which aims at finding synergies and trade-offs between the water, energy, and food resources systems, has been applied to different contexts and levels. However, a limited number of nexus methods have been developed at the food and diet levels, and no commonly recognizable methodology for the nexus assessment has been achieved. An integrated LCA and WEF Nexus approach can be a decisive tool to improve the understanding of the interconnections in the nexus, as it enables the consideration of entire supply chains. | This study is part of the Ceres-Procon Project: Food production and consumption strategies for climate change mitigation (CTM2016-76176-C2-2-R) (AEI/FEDER, UE), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, which aims to determine strategies to improve the sustainability of current food production and consumption.

The European Union&rsquo:s 2030 climate and energy policy and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development underline the commitment to mitigate climate change and reduce its impacts by supporting sustainable use of resources. This commitment has become stricter in light of the ambitious climate neutrality target set by the European Green Deal for 2050. Water, Energy and Food are the key variables of the &ldquo:Nexus Thinking&rdquo: which face the sustainability challenge with a multi-sectoral approach. The aim of the paper is to show the methodological path toward the implementation of an integrated modeling platform based on the Nexus approach and consolidated energy system analysis methods to represent the agri-food system in a circular economy perspective (from the use of water, energy, biomass, and land to food production). The final aim is to support decision-making connected to climate change mitigation. The IEA-The Integrated MARKAL-EFOM System (TIMES) model generator was used to build up the Basilicata Water, Energy and Food model (TIMES-WEF model), which allows users a comprehensive evaluation of the impacts of climate change on the Basilicata agri-food system in terms of land use, yields and water availability and a critical comparison of these indicators in different scenarios. The paper focuses on the construction of the model&rsquo:s Reference Energy and Material System of the TIMES model, which integrates water and agricultural commodities into the energy framework, and on the results obtained through the calibration of the model &beta: version to statistical data on agricultural activities.

Water–energy–food nexus has received global attention, as the interdependency of these resources is crucial to developing conceptual tools for environmental sustainability. Thus, water–energy–food nexus underpins economic development and improves life and well-being. We provide a critical assessment of extant literature on water–energy–food nexus using bibliometric analysis within the last 2 years. Using the keyword “Water-Energy-Food” from 2017 to 2020 in Scopus, data on 235 documents after preprocessing were used for further investigations. We found that scholarly research on water–energy–food nexus is expanding rapidly because of its policy implications. However, results and policy effects were heterogeneous because of a lack of a common conceptual framework of water–energy–food nexus—making the conceptual tool more challenging. Although renewable energy technologies have been described as the antidote for achieving environmental sustainability, however, a sustainability assessment revealed that while fossil fuel energy technologies compete with water withdrawal and consumption, some renewables compete with food for land-use—a situation that requires cost and benefits policy estimation. This article thus highlights that the effect of water–energy–food nexus on environmental sustainability depends on several socioeconomic factors that require attention.

Abstract The European Commission asked EFSA to update its previous Opinion on nickel in food and drinking water, taking into account new occurrence data, the updated benchmark dose (BMD) Guidance and newly available scientific information. More than 47,000 analytical results on the occurrence of nickel were used for calculating chronic and acute dietary exposure. An increased incidence of post‐implantation loss in rats was identified as the critical effect for the risk characterisation of chronic oral exposure and a BMDL10 of 1.3 mg Ni/kg body weight (bw) per day was selected as the reference point for the establishment of a tolerable daily intake (TDI) of 13 μg/kg bw. Eczematous flare‐up reactions in the skin elicited in nickel‐sensitised humans, a condition known as systemic contact dermatitis, was identified as the critical effect for the risk characterisation of acute oral exposure. A BMDL could not be derived, and therefore, the lowest‐observed‐adverse‐effect‐level of 4.3 μg Ni/kg bw was selected as the reference point. The margin of exposure (MOE) approach was applied and an MOE of 30 or higher was considered as being indicative of a low health concern. The mean lower bound (LB)/upper bound (UB) chronic dietary exposure was below or at the level of the TDI. The 95th percentile LB/UB chronic dietary exposure was below the TDI in adolescents and in all adult age groups, but generally exceeded the TDI in toddlers and in other children, as well as in infants in some surveys. This may raise a health concern in these young age groups. The MOE values for the mean UB acute dietary exposure and for the 95th percentile UB raises a health concern for nickel‐sensitised individuals. The MOE values for an acute scenario regarding consumption of a glass of water on an empty stomach do not raise a health concern.

This paper focuses on regional integration through the lenses of the Water–Food–Energy (WEF) nexus, a concept putting strong emphasis on cross-sectoral and multi-level interactions as well as on resource interdependencies. There is an extensive amount of published research focusing on the Aral Sea basin. In this paper, the authors build upon these different contributions and provide a meta-analysis of the literature of WEF nexus opportunities in Central Asia (CA) countries. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions regarding how the WEF Nexus can represent an opportunity for reinforced collaboration regarding resources management. To do so, focusing on existing literature, this paper first (1) explores how the nexus can be a relevant instrument for regional integration. Second (2), it provides an overview of water, food, energy conditions and challenges in the Aral Sea basin in particular. Third (3), synthesizing existing research, the authors identify critical variables to be considered as hurdles or leverage points for WEF nexus implementation in the Aral Sea basin. Finally (4), we go back to our initial set of questions and identify some possible avenues for future research.

Hordein electrospun ultra-thin fibers are unstable in an aqueous environment. Chitosan was added to improve their water resistance. With increasing chitosan concentration, the viscosity and conductivity of the biopolymer blends increased, and the surface tensions remained almost constant. The structure and morphology of composite biopolymer fiber membranes showed that the average fiber diameter varied with chitosan concentration. ATR-FTIR spectra showed that the C–H stretching band changed or disappeared with increased chitosan. X-ray diffraction showed that chitosan was distributed in hordein fibers without crystallites. Compared with the hordein nanofibers, thermogravimetric analysis and derivative thermogravimetry curves showed that hordein/chitosan electrospun fibers had slightly decreased thermal stability. In conclusion, a low chitosan content improved the water resistance and other properties of hordein fibers, without changing their morphology or structure.