Post a comment on the text below

Box 6.3 Water-energy-land-food nexus (WELF nexus)

The nexus concept was first introduced in 2011, when the World Economic Forum published a relevant report on the water-food-energy-climate nexus (Waughray, 2011) and the German Federal Government organised the Bonn 2011 international conference on “The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus - Solutions for the Green Economy” (Martin-Nagle et al., 2012). The links to biodiversity, ecosystems and their services were also highlighted in subsequent research publications (Karabulut et al., 2016). Thus, the core of the WELF nexus is often expanded to include further considerations, such as interactions with climate and ecosystems, and to address not only resources themselves, but also the management objectives for the resources (e.g. water, energy and food security concerns). The WELF nexus has also been studied in the context of transboundary river basin management in the Mekong river (Keskinen et al., 2015) and the Upper Blue Nile (Allam and Eltahir, 2019).

The overall concept of the WELF nexus formed the underlying basis for the establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations in 2015. These global goals highlight the need for systemic approaches for meeting their targets, including those goals related to resource management (Weitz et al., 2014).

While the discussion on nexus has been widely theoretical or related to assessment studies, the operationalisation of nexus in real-life applications has been limited in Europe and worldwide (Bizikova et al., 2013; Leck et al., 2015). The recently formed Nexus Cluster is developing a list of relevant projects around the globe, including research projects funded by the EU (e.g. Sim4Nexus):

 https://www.nexuscluster.eu/Projects.aspx.