FEW Nexus Tool Survey

As a part of the design-research efforts on Moveable Nexus (M-NEX), the Delft University of Technology and University of Michigan teams have initiated ‘a state of the art of practice’ review to assess existing approaches and modelling methods of the FEW Nexus for application in urban design projects. While FEW modelling promises to eliminate siloed thinking, and thereby introduce a more comprehensive system for thinking questions of urban sustainability, many collateral issues facing urban design proposals remain uncaptured by stock and flow modelling approaches. Specifically, with the M-NEX focus on urban agriculture systems within city regions, impacts on health, learning, community building, and social systems reside outside of material and energy flow analysis (MEFA)-based approaches to system modelling emanating from the Environmental Science disciplines. Currently, there is a pronounced lack of FEW nexus evaluation tools that readily lend themselves for utilization by urban designers and planners in making rapid and comparative assessments of the FEW impacts of design interventions. Although there is a broad spectrum of Nexus assessment, modelling, and distributed simulation (DS) tools, these tools often function on the supra-national scale, have a specific entry point, cover certain bi-directional relationships, are unintelligible to a non-skilled user, or are limited by data availability and standardized measures. To address these specific challenges, the team has assembled a comparative survey of available tools, methods, and frameworks for FEW-Nexus based assessment. The literature compiled in this section provides a comprehensive overview of existing FEW assessment tools, methodologies, and corresponding application in urban design propositions and policy formulation. Each research project included in the survey has a specific way of referring to the nexus including FEW, FWE, and WEF. These acronyms are used interchangeably in the compilation.

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
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.

Scaling up Agriculture in City-Regions to mitigate FEW Systems Impact

by Glen T. Daigger, Joshua P. Newell, Nancy G. Love, Nathan McClintock, Mary Gardiner, Eugene Mohareb, Megan Horst, Jennifer Blesh, Anu Ramaswami
School of Natural Resources and Environment and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States

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Summary: This white paper was developed in support of the NSF funded workshop FEW Workshop: “Scaling Up” Urban Agriculture to Mitigate Food-Energy-Water-Impacts” held at the University of Michigan in 2015. The paper summarizes findings from the workshop on the topic of urban agriculture through the lens of food supply, food security, water quality and reuse, energy use, biodiversity, ecosystem health, equity and governance. The paper identifies key research questions and opportunities to develop FEW systems that are more “integrated, sustainable, resilient, and equitable” in nature. The paper suggests that the re-localization of agriculture around urban centres can potentially result in a more resource and cost-efficient systems through the recapturing of FEW systems. The paper indicates research gaps in the current investigations including (i) how to incorporate “socio-economic dynamics”; “ecological structure and function”; “complex interaction with the FEW systems”, “temporal, geographic and jurisdictional scales” of resource management; “scenarios, decision support, and collaborative planning”; and “assess indirect or transboundary impacts of up-scaling” (ii) how do we address ecosystem impacts of existing urban agricultural systems within dense urban centres (iii) how to adequately conceptualize quantitative evaluative measurements to assess and compare urban agricultural practices (v) what are the power dynamics within the FEW systems and who are the beneficiaries?

External Links

International consortium

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