The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals condense the major challenges faced by human society into 17 categories, the core of which are the basic human needs of food, energy, and water. Meeting these requirements is complicated by the fact that the three basic resources are highly intertwined. As a result of the increasing population growth, current energy and water systems are expanding, putting increasing pressure on existing land and inland waters used for food production. Increasing attentions have also been paid to their environmental and socio-economic impacts accordingly. A systematic approach is required to address these impacts and evaluate optimized strategies for infrastructure investment. Computational modelling based decision making tools are useful to quantify interactions within the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus and provide integrated solutions towards more advanced technologies network, while utilizing limited funds as effectively as possible. This work addresses the fundamental issues in FEW nexus and policy making for future planning, using agent-based modelling (ABM) and resource-technology network optimization. It is shown that the developed modelling framework can adapt to multiple resource systems to obtain and satisfy the inherent temporal and spatial demand respectively. The opportunity cost of food production foregone, the global warming potential and economic cost are incorporated into the optimization objective that is directly affected by environmental policies, on the basis of their equivalent monetary value, thereby addressing all nodes of the FEW nexus. We will also present a series of scenarios, which explore the effect of carbon credit price variations, feed-in-tariffs and agricultural intensification to illustrate this framework’s contribution to policy and investment decision-making. We have applied the decision making tools in the Sub-Saharan African country, Ghana when the government is steering the county's future 40-year development plan and demonstrated the effectiveness in multi-sector nexus planning, inclusive of environmental, social, and economic value.

Sustainable planning of food-energy-water nexus through decision making tools

255th National Meeting (2018)

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