Interlinkages between the WEF resources are at the heart of primary resources security, management and allocation, and its impact on the livelihood of people and nations. Health has always been implicitly intertwined with the resource Nexus but mainly as a burden and an outcome of this Nexus. Polluted drinking and irrigation water, fuel emissions, and polluted, unsafe or low nutritious food products have been associated with ill health (e.g., diarrhea, gastrointestinal disease, respiratory illness, food poisoning, malnutrition, and more). All of these impacted health and healthcare and affected world economies. Consequently, interventions to improve the quality of water, energy, and food are critically needed to prevent such illnesses and to yield better community health outcomes.  We propose a new paradigm where Health, defined in wider terms, is yet another resource along with the other resource of water, food, land, and energy. Health of individuals and communities is not merely the absence of sickness and disease. It surmounts physiology and pathology to encompass mental and spiritual health, dignity, and self-expression. It is the culmination of why we sought to manage the resource nexus to start with. Poverty, low education, gender inequities, and lack of participation and agency contribute to poor health outcomes and undermine people’s appreciation of water, energy & food as sustainable and renewable resources. Greed, nepotism, self-interest, economic disparities, injustice, and other social and political factors are the root causes of poor health and unrestrained exploitation of water, energy, and food resources. In that light health becomes the epicenter of the nexus, the driver, as well as the outcome of good management and good governance of the resource nexus.  Investing in health as a resource closes the loop for the WEF resource nexus. Only fulfilled individuals living with dignity in a participatory setting can contribute to their imagined communities and the development of a vision for their happiness and wellbeing and of policies and practices that protect their environment and resources.  We call for an expansion of the WEF Nexus to include an H for Health. At the American University of Beirut, we established WEFRAH which stands for Water, Energy, and Food Research and Action for Health. The inclusion of health also closes the loop on achieving the SDGs and humanizes the resources nexus and places people at the core of the Nexus dialogue.

Water, energy, food, and health: The H in WEFRAH is yet another resource

ACS Fall 2021

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