Managing the food, water, and energy nexus for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in South Asia

By G. Rasul. 2016

422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract South Asian countries face mounting challenges in meeting the growing demand for food, water, and energy for a rapidly growing population. Countries have provided policy support to increase cereal production, including providing incentives by subsidizing water and energy and guaranteeing rice and wheat prices. While such incentives have increased cereal production, they have also increased the demand for water and energy, led to degradation of the resource base, and contributed to an increase in water-related disease. Despite the inherent interconnections between food, water, and energy production, agencies often work in a fragmented and isolated way. Poor sectoral coordination and institutional fragmentation have triggered an unsustainable use of resources and threatened the long-term sustainability of food, water, and energy security in the region, and also posed challenges to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Free water and subsidized electricity have not only encouraged overexploitation of resources, they have also led to under-investment in water and energy-saving technologies and approaches and hindered crop diversification and broad-based agricultural growth in line with the comparative advantages. Greater policy coherence among the three sectors is critical for decoupling increased food production from water and energy intensity and moving to a sustainable and efficient use of resources. The nexus approach can enhance understanding of the interconnectedness of the sectors and strengthen coordination among them. But it requires a major shift in the decision-making process towards taking a holistic view and developing institutional mechanisms to coordinate the actions of diverse actors and strengthen complementarities and synergies among the three sectors. A framework is suggested for cross-sectoral coordination and managing the nexus challenges.

Subfields: Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Pollution, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/500944452a8ee743fcc880118b76d828eeb904e7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Energy Engineering and Power Technology

In Pollution

In Water Science and Technology

Citations in the corpus

Understanding barriers to decision making in the UK energy-food-water nexus: The added value of interdisciplinary approaches (2016, background): “…working in and across the nexus have sought to characterize, understand and eliminate trade-offs and tensions across and between these sectors (Rasul, 2015; Rasul and Sharma, 2015), whilst simultaneously highlighting opportunities, synergies and common goals (e.g. the UK's EPSRC Sandpit…”
Population–Urbanization–Energy Nexus: A Review (2019, background): “Golam Rasul [75] Water–energy–food South Asia • Lack of sectoral coordination has threatened food, water, and energy security • Improved policy coherence among food, water, and energy bis required 2016 16.”
The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Climate Risks and Opportunities in Southern Africa (2018, methodology): “It has grown to be an essential approach to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on poverty alleviation, zero hunger, provision of water and sanitation, and access to affordable and reliable energy (Goals 1, 2, 6, and 7, respectively) [4].”
Aligning the Criteria of Green Economy (GE) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to Implement Sustainable Development (2019, neutral): “Other publications suggested using quantitative methods, such as the ‘nexus’ approach [19,24,33,35] or multi-criteria analysis [36–39] to support decision making for SDGs implementation.”
Connecting the sustainable development goals by their energy inter-linkages (2018, neutral): “…Finco and Doppler (2010); Gao and Bryan (2017); Hasegawa et al. (2015); Kline et al. (2017); Lotze-Campen et al. (2014); Msangi et al. (2010); Rasul (2016); Ringler et al. (2013); Ringler et al. (2016); Schwerhoff and Sy (2017); Smith et al. (2013); Smith, P. et al. (2014); Sola et al.…”
Initial progress in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): a review of evidence from countries (2018, background): “2015; Le Blanc 2015; Rasul 2016; Weitz et al.”