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

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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.

Energy modeling and the Nexus concept

by Floor Brouwer, Georgios Avgerinopoulos, Dora Fazekas, Chrysi Laspidou, Jean-Francois Mercure, Hector Pollitt, Eunice Pereira Ramos, Mark Howells
Wageningen Research, The Hague, The Netherlands; Division of Energy Systems Analysis, Royal Institute of Technology - KTH, Stockholm, Sweden; Cambridge Econometrics, United Kingdom; Civil Engineering Department, University of Thessaly, Greece; Radboud University, Faculty of Science, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

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Summary: The paper provides an overview of modeling tools designed to analyse energy systems within the broader context of food, water, energy, land, and climate nexus. The paper evaluates six energy-based models including E3ME-FTT- “Macroeconomic simulation model”, MAGENT-, CAPRI- “Global agro-economic model”, IMAGE-“comprehensive integrated modelling framework of global environmental change”, OSeMOSYS- “Systems cost-optimisation model”, and MAGPIE-LPjML- “Global land use allocation model, coupled to grid-based dynamic vegetation.” The paper highlights crossovers between models and provide insights into underlined assumptions made for each of the models. The study calls for further analysis into land markets such as impact of renewable energy potential, interdisciplinary research involving food science, engineering, and hydrology, and finally involving stakeholder engagement to bring forth interaction between science and policy.

Quantifying the Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Current Status and Trends

by Yuan Chang, Guijun Li, Yuan Yao, Lixiao Zhang, Chang Yu
School of Management Science and Engineering, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China; McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA; State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment; Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; School of Economics and Management, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China;

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Summary: The paper demonstrates how quantifying WEF nexus linkages reveal synergies and trade-offs across sectors and generates compressive methods of managing and developing the nexus. The study summarizes global estimates of WEF linkages, draws attention to limitations and methodological challenges associated with system calculation, and indicates ways by which robust WEF quantifications can be achieved. The paper reveals how previous studies on two-sector modelling and assessment (water-energy, water-food, and food-energy) have provided the basis for integrated WEF nexus modelling and analysis. However, the present research lacks the comparability of results, with differing “boundaries, definitions, approaches, and methodologies” adopted for WEF nexus quantifications. Lastly, the paper advocates synthesizing of definition, synergistically developing WEF databases, coordinating top-down and bottom-up approaches, and “developing an integrated and flexible analytical framework” of analysis.

Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus Tool 2.0: Guiding integrative resource planning and decision making

by Bassel T. Dahera, Rabi H. Mohtarb
Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, and Zachery Department of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, United States.
Online tool: http://wefnexustool.org/register.php

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Summary: The paper presents an online nexus modelling and assessment tool to study the overall impact of varying degrees of food production (self-sufficiency index) on the nexus and determine strategic allocation of national resources. The tool quantifies linkages between food, energy, and water systems in a scenario-based format while considering present as well as future implications on the nexus based on population trends, changing economies and policies, and climate change. The tool primarily focuses on the middle eastern bioclimatic region for analysis. The authors apply the tool to the Qatar context and reveal that “land” as a resource is sensitive to the varying degrees of food self-sufficiency in the country. Thus, there is a need for improving the yield of locally produced food, and identifying alternative methods, such as sustainable trade practices, to ensure food security in the country.

External Links

International consortium

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