Water Resources: the Central Component of the WEF Nexus?
Abstract
Increasing population growth, consumption of natural resources, and deterioration of the environment coupled with climate change impacts (such as increased variability in precipitation) will challenge our abilities to provide water, energy and food (WEF) to the global populace. Less developed areas, such as the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, are particularly vulnerable to such resource issues due to immature governance and management structures and strategies. We introduce an integrated approach to resource security analysis, which traditionally has focused on the WEF components separately and apply the methods to a suite of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, we evaluate the inter-connected nature of WEF securities by considering physical, demographic, socioeconomic, health, and institutional parameters related to each of the resource securities and by analyzing the relationships among the metrics. For example, reported food deficits for countries are strongly correlated with reported levels of access to safe drinking water. Multivariate statistical analyses are applied to identify relationships among resources and to develop indices that robustly and comprehensively capture the WEF nexus. Our results indicate that water plays the central role in the WEF nexus, due to its extensive use for both food and energy production in these countries. This approach provides a framework for analyzing the WEF nexus in other regions of the world.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMGC31D1018D
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0495 Water/energy interactions;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1834 Human impacts;
- HYDROLOGY