National water, food, and trade modeling framework: The case of Egypt

Abstract

This paper introduces a modeling framework for the analysis of real and virtual water flows at national scale. The framework has two components: (1) a national water model that simulates agricultural, industrial and municipal water uses, and available water and land resources; and (2) an international virtual water trade model that captures national virtual water exports and imports related to trade in crops and animal products. This National Water, Food & Trade (NWFT) modeling framework is applied to Egypt, a water-poor country and the world's largest importer of wheat. Egypt's food and water gaps and the country's food (virtual water) imports are estimated over a baseline period (1986–2013) and projected up to 2050 based on four scenarios. Egypt's food and water gaps are growing rapidly as a result of steep population growth and limited water resources. The NWFT modeling framework shows the nexus of the population dynamics, water uses for different sectors, and their compounding effects on Egypt's food gap and water self-sufficiency. The sensitivity analysis reveals that for solving Egypt's water and food problem non-water-based solutions like educational, health, and awareness programs aimed at lowering population growth will be an essential addition to the traditional water resources development solution. Both the national and the global models project similar trends of Egypt's food gap. The NWFT modeling framework can be easily adapted to other nations and regions.

Global virtual water trade and the hydrological cycle: patterns, drivers, and socio-environmental impacts

“…Both fitness models and gravity models can be run with projected inputs to assess the possible evolution of trade network and flows (e.g. Suweis et al 2011, Sartori et al 2017, Abdelkader et al 2018. Equilibrium models as well can be applied to assess different future scenarios.…”

A Literature Review to Propose a Systematic Procedure to Develop “Nexus Thinking” Considering the Water–Energy–Food Nexus

“…From the literature review, it was possible to notice a growing increase in the use of the term nexus in scientific papers (see Figure 2), especially from 2016 (79% for a total of 304 papers). Different authors have also highlighted the increasing attention paid to the nexus theme [22,25,27,30,53,54].…”

“…From the literature review, it was possible to notice a growing increase in the use of the term nexus in scientific papers (see Figure 2), especially from 2016 (79% for a total of 304 papers). Different authors have also highlighted the increasing attention paid to the nexus theme [22,25,27,30,53,54]. This increase mainly was due to two aspects: the increased use of the nexus approach in global discourse and debates about the natural resources [54,55]; and the lack of clarity and consensus related to the presentation of its concept and application [30,55], which generates doubts and uncertainties that can promote research.…”

“…Quantitative evaluation among links-physical elements [42,44,53,67,79,83,91,104,107,135,139,168] (a) Water: water availability (surface, underground); unconventional water sources; quantification of water consumption for irrigation, energy technologies, industry, and human supply; reservoir physical and operative data (initial volume, maximum volume, dead volume, quota × volume and quota vs. area curve, evaporation, observed volumes, operating volumes); water quality; sediment transport; and georeferenced data. (b) Energy: definition of primary and secondary energy sources; hydroelectric power generation data (turbine maximum flow, energy demands of the reservoirs in operation); quantification of energy needs for human supply (pumping, treatment, and distribution); quantification of energy needs for agricultural (crop, harvest, fertilizer, machine, and transportation) and livestock production; and georeferenced data.…”

Tools for reconstructing the bilateral trade network: a critical assessment

“…Moreover, the proposed country-specific OLS regressions generate estimations consistent with real data and with a high goodness of fit. 9 Note that an import-side regression might be calibrated to describe the trade flows entering a given country(Tuninetti et al, 2017); however, it has been proved that the export-side regression outperforms the import law by showing higher coefficients of determination(Tamea et al, 2014;Abdelkader et al, 2018).…”