Water, energy, and food (WEF) are vital resources for human wellbeing, poverty reduction, and sustainable development. Climate change effects are proved to threaten the WEF security and vice versa. Considering these threats as disturbances to a system, resilience is understood as the system’s adaptive ability to maintain its functionality even when the system is being affected by a disturbance. Resilience helps researchers and policymakers comprehend how complex systems adapt and transform to withstand changes in the environment and measure a WEF system’s capability to either adapt or collapse due to climate change conditions, or due to over-exertion on one of the system components. The Water-Energy-Food-Climate (WEFC) Nexus approach in combination with system resilience measurement is the key solution to enhance agro-ecological health. This research focuses on exploring the resilience of a WEFC system at national level. The case study is based on the structure of a System Dynamics Model that maps sector-specific data from major databases for the national case study of Greece. A Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) and a Stock-and-Flow Diagram (SFD) is presented. CLD helps in the conceptualisation of the WEFC system, identifying the system key variables and indicating the causal relationship among modules, while SFD implements the simulation using stocks, flows and convertors. The system has four reinforcing and two balancing loops. In terms of enhancing agro-ecological health, we quantify system resilience as a next step, using different metrics, in different cases of disturbances and ultimately indicate the most efficient policies to increase system “elasticity”. Since future global challenges will severely affect all vital resources and threaten environmental resilience, it is urgent to identify how WEFC systems can improve and to formulate policies that help stakeholders and policymakers to adapt to the challenging conditions. This research aims to fulfilling this gap, offering a comprehensive methodology for a combined Resilience-Nexus approach.

Enhancing Agro-ecological system resilience through a Water – Energy – Food – Climate nexus approach

ACS Fall 2021

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