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.

Managing freshwater allocation for a highly populated and growing economy like India can benefit from knowledge about the effect of economic activities. This study transforms the 2003-2004 economic input-output (IO) table of India into a water withdrawal input-output model to quantify direct and indirect flows. This unique model is based on a comprehensive database compiled from diverse public sources, and estimates direct and indirect water withdrawal of all economic sectors. It distinguishes between green (rainfall), blue (surface and ground), and scarce groundwater. Results indicate that the total direct water withdrawal is nearly 3052 billion cubic meter (BCM) and 96% of this is used in agriculture sectors with the contribution of direct green water being about 1145 BCM, excluding forestry. Apart from 727 BCM direct blue water withdrawal for agricultural, other significant users include "Electricity" with 64 BCM, "Water supply" with 44 BCM and other industrial sectors with nearly 14 BCM. "Construction", "miscellaneous food products"; "Hotels and restaurants"; "Paper, paper products, and newsprint" are other significant indirect withdrawers. The net virtual water import is found to be insignificant compared to direct water used in agriculture nationally, while scarce ground water associated with crops is largely contributed by northern states.

Resource scarcity is capable of affecting economic activity. Though the dependence of direct users is easily acknowledged, indirect vulnerability imposed on downstream sectors of the economic system is not as easily understood. In the context of growing water scarcity across India, this study maps the dependence of prominent sectors of the Indian economy to the water‐withdrawal model of India (Bogra, Bakshi, & Mathur, 2016). From the suppliers' perspective, the results indicate that embodied water of the largest direct water‐withdrawing food sectors namely, Paddy, Wheat, and Sugarcane (PWS) is indirectly consumed mostly by the consumptive food sectors. However, from the users' perspective, even non‐food sectors exhibit a significant dependence on the embodied water of PWS. Further, blue‐water‐based structural path analysis (SPA) of Paddy and Wheat indicate significant contributions to Land transport, Construction, and Beverages, among others, whereas Land transport is important in terms of green water too. The out‐degree measure indicates a higher dependence of the economy on Electricity (blue water) and Forestry (green water) sectors. Specifically, infrastructural sectors exhibit a significant dependence on Electricity; whereas Forestry products contribute to non‐food sectors. State‐wise water‐scarcity indices (WSIs) indicate higher dependence of Electricity on scarce surface‐water flows of north‐western and central states, whereas forested areas in the north and north‐eastern parts of India exhibit lowest ground WSIs. By integrating regional flows with sectoral dependencies, it is observed that the risk to a reduction of the economy's throughput is higher from water withdrawn by Electricity compared to food sectors, PWS.

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