Food, water, and energy security in South Asia: A nexus perspective from the Hindu Kush Himalayan region☆

By G. Rasul. 2014

516 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract With limited land resources, inadequate energy supply, and growing water stress, South Asia faces the challenge of providing enough water and energy to grow enough food for the burgeoning population. Using secondary data from diverse sources, this paper explores the food, water, and energy nexus from a regional dimension, emphasizing the role of Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) ecosystem services in sustaining food, water, and energy security downstream. The analysis reveals that the issues and challenges in the food, water, and energy sectors are interwoven in many complex ways and cannot be managed effectively without cross-sectoral integration. The most distinctive feature of the nexus in South Asia is the high degree of dependency of downstream communities on upstream ecosystem services for dry-season water for irrigation and hydropower, drinking water, and soil fertility and nutrients. This finding suggests that along with cross-sectoral integration to improve the resource-use efficiency and productivity of the three sectors, regional integration between upstream and downstream areas is critical in food, water, and energy security. Within the nexus approach in South Asia, equal attention should be paid to management of HKH ecosystems–especially the watersheds, catchments, and headwaters of river systems–and to tapping the potential of collaborative gains in water, hydropower, and other ecosystem services through coordination across HKH countries.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Pollution, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b885d126d6248966dc92da9d1526c467d618637

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Citations in the corpus

Sustaining Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (2019, background): “With increasing awareness of upstream and downstream linkages, biodiversity and ecosystem services have been recognized for their ecological, sociocultural, and economic values (Rasul 2014).”
Evaluating Synergies and Trade-Offs among Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Explorative Analyses of Development Paths in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (2018, background): “security in both Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa region [60].”
Managing the food, water, and energy nexus for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in South Asia (2016, methodology): “These factors are not only interdependent, they also both reinforce and impose constraints on one another (Rasul, 2014;Weitz et al., 2014; Rasul and Sharma, 2015; GDI, 2015).”
Sustainable development and the water–energy–food nexus: A perspective on livelihoods (2015, background): “…accounted for within nexus frameworks, a small but growing body of research has highlighted the value of nexus-based approaches for evaluating the effects of development on livelihoods and for promoting sustainable livelihood practices (e.g. Granit et al., 2012; Bouapao, 2012; Rasul, 2014).”
Seasonal cycle of precipitation over major river basins in South and Southeast Asia: a review of the CMIP5 climate models data for present climate and future climate projections (2015, background): “The annual per capita water availability has substantially reduced and it still faces growing stress due to population growth and ongoing economic development (Babel and Wahid, 2008; Eriksson et al., 2009, Rasul, 2014).”
Anatomy of a buzzword: The emergence of ‘the water-energy-food nexus’ in UK natural resource debates (2016, background): “…Middleton and Allen, 2014; Scott et al., 2011; Sharmina et al., 2016) and as a framing for academic work from across a range of disciplines (Azapagic, 2015; Biggs, 2015; e.g. De Laurentiis et al., 2016; Lubega, William Naggaga, 2014; Rasul, 2014; Smajgl et al., 2016; Yumkella and Yillia, 2015).”
Opportunities for knowledge co-production across the energy-food-water nexus: Making interdisciplinary approaches work for better climate decision making (2017, background): “One such example is the case of Hindu Kush Himalayan ecosystem services in South Asia, which demonstrated that in order to sustain resilience of resources and food, water, and energy security in the region, crosssectoral integration was needed, along with regional integration between upstream and do”
The global nexus of food–trade–water sustaining environmental flows by 2050 (2019, background): “For example, on a regional level, 223 finding trade-offs between water, food and energy remains a challenge in Southeast Asia, where 224 conflicts between downstream and upstream water users may exist and where increasing the water use 225 efficiency remains a priority (Rasul 2014).”
The nexus approach to water–energy–food security: an option for adaptation to climate change (2016, background): “Increasingly water- and energy-intensive food production in the face of water and energy scarcity Around 39% of the cropland in South Asia is under irrigation, and irrigated land accounts for 60–80% of food production (Rasul, 2014).”