Stakeholder-Driven Adaptation Planning of Food-Energy-Water Nexus in Local Communities

For long it has been realized that the complexity in the interconnectedness between humans and the natural environment is an important justification for engaging stakeholders in any natural resource management problem. The same argument can be extended to the management of the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus that requires multiple considerations including the relationship of humans with water, energy, and land resources, and the economic sectors that depend on these resources. Especially, managing the nexus for an uncertain future will require better understanding of how humans respond to diverse stresses and threats, such as climate change impacts, changing political and socio-economic considerations, natural hazards, etc. This understanding can then be used to improve how stakeholder knowledge is formulated into "stakeholder-relevant" mitigation and adaptation decision problems. In this presentation, the process of discovering and formulating an adaptation planning problem for a community of large number of FEW stakeholders is examined in the regions of Umatilla and Morrow counties in Oregon. Discovery of the FEW nexus adaptation problem was accomplished via co-production of knowledge, involving researchers and community stakeholders. The iterative process of discovery was then used to formulate and validate a conceptual model of how the community's FEW nexus would adapt to changes in water rights and availability in the region. The conceptual model was validated using stakeholder engagement, before the model was quantified using hierarchical decision approaches and integrated within a novel cyberinfrastructure, InterACTWEL (Interactive Adaptation and Collaboration Tool for managing Water, Energy and Land).