Sustainable Water Resource Management in the Water–Energy–Food Nexus under Climate Change
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Water Management".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 29 October 2024 | Viewed by 93
Special Issue Editor
Interests: integrated water resource management; transboundary waters; conflict resolution; sustainable agriculture; climate change; floods; droughts; energy use
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The main goal of the Water–Energy–Food Nexus (WEFN) is to increase environmental resilience by taking advantage of the synergies between the three WEFN socioeconomic sectors. There is no doubt that these sectors are interdependent: for example, more energy used to pump water for irrigation may increase agricultural food production. In this Special Issue (SI), we focus on water sustainability under climate change, which is the main factor for environmental safety.
We can consider the WEFN as a particular case of the Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) framework because the inter-sector integration is restricted to water, energy, and food.
The main difficulty in implementing the WEFN is that winners and losers appear among the three interacting sectors. For example, if we maximize food production, we may consume excessive water and energy. Mathematically, maximizing food and minimizing water and energy use is a multiple-criteria decision-making problem. No unique solution to this problem exists. Between multiple acceptable solutions, we may choose the most preferable option by ensuring water security (through the use of recyclable water only), obtaining energy sufficiency (avoiding energy overuse), and producing sufficient food. A resilient WEFN may lead to human and environmental sustainability in this case.
The existing literature can be consulted in SIs published by Sustainability with water as the main keyword. Case studies, success stories, and papers demonstrating the co-benefits of the WEFFN on renewable energy, solar pumping for irrigation, smart agriculture based on a precise water supply, and saving water by planting less water-demanding crops are welcome.
Prof. Dr. Jacques Ganoulis
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- water security
- sustainable agriculture
- efficient-energy use
- nexus
