This paper develops a generalizable systems framework to analyze the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus from an urban systems perspective, connecting in-and trans-boundary interactions, quantifying multiple environmental impacts of community-wide FEW provisioning to cities, and visualizing FEW supply-chain risks posed to cities by the environment. Delhi's community-wide food demand includes household consumption by socio-economic-strata, visitors-and industrial food-use. This demand depends 90%, 76%, and 86% on trans-boundary supply of FEW, respectively. Supply chain data reveal unique features of trans-boundary FEW production regions (e.g. irrigation-electricity needs and GHG intensities of power-plants), yielding supply chaininformed coupled energy-water-GHG footprints of FEW provisioning to Delhi. Agri-food supply contributes to both GHG (19%) and water-footprints (72%-82%) of Delhi's FEW provisioning, with milk, rice and wheat dominating these footprints. Analysis of FEW interactions within Delhi found >75% in-boundary water-use for food is for urban agriculture and >76% in-boundary energy-use for food is from cooking fuels. Food waste-to-energy and energy-intensity of commercial and industrial food preparation are key data gaps. Visualizing supply chains shows >75% of water embodied in Delhi's FEW supply is extracted from locations over-drafting ground water. These baseline data enable evaluation of future urban FEW scenarios, comparing impacts of demand shifts, production shifts, and emerging technologies and policies, within and outside of cities.
Open-burning of municipal solid waste (MSW) is a major source of PM emissions in developing world cities, but few studies have characterized this phenomenon at the city and intracity (neighborhood) scale relevant to human health impacts. This paper develops a consistent field method for measuring the spatial frequency of the incidence of MSW-burning and presents results in three neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic status (SES) in Delhi, India, observed in winter and summer over 2 years. Daily MSW-burning incidents ranged from 24 to 130/km2-day during winter and 5-87/km2-day during summer, with the highest intensity in low SES neighborhoods. Distinct seasonal and diurnal patterns are observed. The daily mass of MSW-burned was also estimated at 90-1170 kg/km2-day and 13-1100 kg/km2-day in highest to low SES neighborhoods, in winter and summer, respectively. The scaled-up estimate of total MSW-burned for Delhi city ranged from 190 to 246 tons/day, about 2%-3% of total generated MSW; morning-burning contributed >65% of the total. MSW composition varied systematically across neighborhoods and season. Agra had much higher MSW-burning (39-202 incidents/km2-day; 672-3485 kg/km2-day) in the summer. The field method thus captures differences in MSW-burning across cities, neighborhoods, diurnally and seasonally, important for more fine grained air pollution modeling, and for tracking/monitoring policy effectiveness on-ground.
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