Open Research Forum // Food-Energy-Water Systems: Opportunities at the Nexus
Ed. by Anne R. Kapuscinski, Michael E. Chang and Kim Locke. This Elementa Forum welcomes research articles, reviews, policy bridges, practice bridges (including education), and commentaries that explore the nexus between two or more food, energy, and water systems. At what temporal and spatial scales do these systems relate? How do materials, energy, nutrients, and economic and human capital flow among these systems? Who or what manages or regulates their exchange? How and to what extent will changes in climate, hydrology, urbanization, or agribusiness affect these relationships? What are the life cycle impacts and costs of traditional and alternative systems? How might these systems be physically developed, linked to natural environments, and organizationally managed to increase system sustainability and resilience? Are education and workforce training practices providing students and workers with sufficient understanding of these complex systems? Which of these (and thousands of other) questions are most important for scientists to study? How can we accelerate the interdisciplinary collaborations needed to inform sustainable solutions at the food-energy-water nexus?
- Integrated Food-Energy Systems (IFES) range from growing side-by-side food and energy crops, as in agroforestry, to siting of solar and other common renewable energy technologies, to more complex systems where waste products from one part of the farm system or off-farm becomes the energy feedstock for energy generation. They offer exciting environmental, economic and social benefits, including offsetting fossil fuel use, product diversification and increased efficiencies and reducing costs via closing resource and energy loops. But there also are challenges/obstacles to their more rapid and widespread adoption. Under what conditions (social, economic, technological, etc.) are IFES likely to thrive? Under what conditions are they severely hindered or unlikely to emerge at all? What key levers exist for creating favorable conditions and scaling up their adoption?
- Large scale infrastructure systems (transportation networks; energy grids; water, sewer, and storm water systems; and commercial food production and distribution systems) function at the interface between human society and the environment by processing resources and information, providing goods and services, and managing wastes. Though they are often designed, built, and operated independent from each other, they function like ecosystems, in which components exchange energy, materials, and information. Understanding the mechanisms through which these systems are interconnected is still a young science, however, and learning how to control and leverage these interconnections is a desirable engineering goal. Contributions are invited that bring insight into the emerging discipline of infrastructure ecology that links together food, energy, and water systems.
Publications
- Opportunities for energy-water nexus management in the Middle East and North Africa
By Amro M. Farid, William N. Lubega and William W. Hickman
October 2016
Website
- Elementa - Science of the Anthropocene: "Food-Energy-Water Systems: Opportunities at the Nexus"