FEW Nexus Tool Survey

Contact

The Moveable Nexus (M-NEX): Design-led urban food, water, and energy management innovation in new boundary conditions of change, is a design research-based effort delivering FEW system assessment tools and pragmatic design solutions through stakeholder engaged living labs in six bioregions across the world. This co-design research initiative is based on three interdisciplinary knowledge platforms of design, evaluation, and participation. Each platform assembles, structures, and synthesizes existing knowledge, tools, data, methods, models and case studies for FEW nexus applications.
The following tool compilation is part of the evaluation platform and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF): Award 1832214 and Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this compilation are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organization.

Metrics

The investigation applies scale (global/ regional/ national/ local), access (public/ private), year (2011-2019), intended user (researcher/ planner / policymakers) and publication type (website/ software/ journal article/ report) as metric for cataloguing the survey. All publications in the tool survey have been summarized in the later sections. The literature compiled here follows the timeline 2011-2019, that is after the release of two pivotal publications, Hoff (2011) and World Economic Forum (2011), that brought the concept of FEW-Nexus to global academic attention.

The following table lists projects and papers reviewing FEW tools and methodologies.

Title	Scale	Access	Year	Intended User	Publication Type
The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: A systematic review of methods for nexus assessment	Global	Open	2018	Researchers / Policy Makers	Journal Article
Energy modeling and the Nexus concept	Global	Public	2018	Researchers / Policy Makers	Journal Article
Quantifying the Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Current Status and Trends	Global	Public	2016	Researcher	Journal Article
Scale	Neighborhood	Precinct: Uni-campus	Metropolitan region	Large Greenfield: 3rd City	Neighborhood	Neighborhood
FEW-focus	F: Diet, E: Algae, W: Flood	F: Local plantation, lowering UHI, E: Solar, W: Drought, reuse,	F: Urban production, E: Waste to energy, W: Great Lakes Basin,	F: Regional food-bowl, E: Large and small hydro, W: Heat	F: Food in urban rooftop/rural, E: Solar, W: Water-river basin	F: High tech, vertical, E: Wind & integrated renewables, W: flood, controlled
Motto	‘The Aquaponic city’	‘The urban water machine’	‘The post-industrial city’	‘The fridge city’	‘WISE city’*1	‘The circular city’
Take away	Technologies	People Engagement	Regional synergies Scalar Cascades	Far future design	Community Engagement	Design with flows for far future
Goal	Existing technologies in the city	Expanding the effectiveness of food production in the city with minimal water availability	How to overcome jurisdictional barriers	Using landscape as cooling machine through plantation, crops and water	Multi-layer FEW cycles	Close FEW cycles at city level
Data	Baseline data	Place based data (QU campus)	Regional jurisdictional data	Regional landscape data	Building and land use data	Flows of FEW data
Method for workshop	Roadshow	Design workshop	Large scale spatial drawing	Creative COCD	Design Workshop & GIS analysis	Stakeholder co-design
Paradigm shifts	2050-2080	2050-2100	2035-2070	2030-2060	2040-2080	2040-2070
Outputs	Part I of few-print: Advanced FEW Technologies in the city into the future	Part II of few-print: Community gardens and permaculture, for higher scales	Part III of few-print: Jurisdictional system, Visualizing Cascading systems and scales	Part IV of few-print: FEW-urban landscapes	Part V of few-print: FEW-integration in local community	Part VI of few-print: Energy cascading / REAP for Food and Water

External Links

International consortium

• Prof. Wanglin Yan, Keio University (Japan, Lead PI)
• Dr. Bijon Kumar Mitra, Institute of Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) (Japan)