FEW Nexus Tool Survey
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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 |
| Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus Tool 2.0: Guiding integrative resource planning and decision making | Regional | Private | 2015 | Researcher / Planners / Policy Maker | Journal Article , Website |
| Scaling up Agriculture in City-Regions to mitigate FEW Systems Impact | Global | Public | 2016 | Researcher / Planners / Urban Designers / Policy Maker | University Publication / White Paper |
| Complexity versus simplicity in water energy food nexus (WEF) assessment tools | Global | Private | 2018 | Researcher | Journal Article |
| Global Climate, Land, Energy & Water Strategies (CLEWS) | Global | Public | 2012 | Researcher | Journal Article, Website |
Nexus Assessment Tools and Methods
The following section elaborates the compiled literature on tools and methods.
The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: A systematic review of methods for nexus assessment.
by Tamee R Albrecht, Arica Crootof, Christopher A Scott
Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, and School of Geography and Development University of Arizona, United States
Summary: The paper provides a literature review of WEF nexus methods and approaches in scientific analysis. The study reveals that the repetitive use of a specific research methodology to capture WEF nexus is rare and most analyses are predisposed towards siloed thinking and do not capture the entirety of the nexus. Further, most analyses follow quantitative methods, followed by social science methodologies, and only one-fifth include both quantitative and qualitative approaches. To evaluate analytical tools compiled in the literature, the paper applies four distinct metrics including innovation, context, collaboration, and implementation. The evaluation results with eighteen promising studies on WEF nexus. The paper advocates for stakeholder engagement and interdisciplinary research incorporating social and political assessment of the contexts.
Summary
External Links
International consortium
- Prof. Wanglin Yan, Keio University (Japan, Lead PI)
- Dr. Bijon Kumar Mitra, Institute of Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) (Japan)
