A Methodology to Assess the Water Energy Food Ecosystems Nexus in Transboundary River Basins

Abstract

Abstract:The "nexus" is a potentially very appropriate approach to enhance resource efficiency and good governance in transboundary basins. Until now, however, evidence has been confined to isolated case studies and the nexus approach remains largely undefined. The methodology presented in this paper, developed for preparing a series of nexus assessments of selected river basins under the Water Convention of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), is a timely contribution to this ongoing debate. The nexus assessment of a transboundary basin has the objective of identifying trade-offs and impacts across sectors and countries and to propose possible policy measures and technical actions at national and transboundary levels to reduce intersectoral tensions. This is done jointly with policy makers and local experts. Compared to an Integrated Water Resource Management approach, the water energy food ecosystems nexus approach concurrently considers multiple sectors and their evolution. This offers the opportunity to better involve key economic sectors-energy and agriculture in particular-in the dialogue over transboundary water resource uses, protection and management.

The Water-Energy-Food Nexus and the Transboundary Context: Insights from Large Asian Rivers

“…This provides a foundation for an illustrative comparative nexus analysis for three regions centred around selected transboundary Asian river basins. Based on this analysis as well as the relevant findings from the other articles published in this Special Issue [17,21,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33], we then discuss what the nexus means in the specific context of transboundary river basins, noting the implications that transboundary context bring to nexus approaches, and vice versa.…”

“…Water 2016, 8,193 2 of 25 international borders [17,[22][23][24][25]. Despite all these publications, the actual added value provided by the nexus approach in different contexts remains partly unclear and also contested.…”

“…Even the very name of the approach is not consistent, with the three nexus sectors written in differing order and the term "security" both included and excluded from the term. The actual number of nexus sectors also differs, focusing sometimes only on two sectors (e.g., [13,14]) or extended to additional sectors such as climate change [15,16], ecosystems [17] and livelihoods [18]. The terms change too, for example, food is sometimes replaced by land [19].…”

Water research in Germany: from the reconstruction of the Roman Rhine to a risk assessment for aquatic neophytes

“…It was popularized much more recently, following the ''The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus'' and ''Water in the Anthropocene'' conferences in Bonn, Germany, in 2011 and 2013, respectively (Ibisch et al 2016a). One major difference is that water management is not the main focus of the nexus but that multiple sectors are considered concurrently to find sustainable solutions (de Strasser et al 2016;Ibisch et al 2016a). Even though the European Water Framework Directive (EU-WFD) is sometimes considered as an implementation tool for IWRM, the directive was adopted to unify the highly fragmented European water policies (Heldt et al 2017;Rahaman et al 2004) which focus on the ecosystem-based protection of European water resources.…”

Water in Central Asia: an integrated assessment for science-based management

“…The nexus concept, which considers the tradeoffs between different water-dependent activities, has recently received a strong attention for mitigating Central Asia's water challenges. Typically, a strong emphasis is on energy and food, because (a) hydropower plays a significant role for regional energy production and (b) irrigation is the largest single consumer of water (de Strasser et al 2016;Guillaume et al 2015). In fact, a centrally managed water-food-energy nexus existed during socialist times, but collapsed with the breakup of the Soviet Union (Bekchanov and Lamers 2016).…”