Task 5.6: Interdisciplinary cooperation on the food-water-energy nexus (FWEN)

The concept for the interdisciplinary challenge was developed by Tiwah and several alternatives were proposed to the partnership in 2015. The partnership selected the “Energy-Food-Water Nexus” (FWEN) as the interdisciplinary challenge to be addressed by ENEON. The FWEN is an important example of the interdependency of the Sustainable Development Goals. SDGs. It directly involves the SDGs 2, 6, and 7 and impacts a number of other goals. It also is linked to 70% of the consumed water and 33% of the global anthropogenic energy usage (Figure 34). Taking a nexus approach helps to consider the interdependencies in a comprehensive way.

The growing global population - coupled with changing patterns of consumption - is increasing the demand for food, water and energy. Food security depends on parameters related to the availability of water and soil, soil quality, vegetation stresses, and yield variance. It also depends on the availability of energy for the many processes involved in agriculture, transportation, and food processing. The increasingly limited land available for agricultural activities, which is reduced due to soil loss and degradation, competing land use, and climate change introduces risk to food security.

Changes in ecosystems also have an impact on agricultural productivity, and a potential state shift in ecosystems (Barskovi et al.) could rapidly lead to significant loss of productivity. More intensive food production is needed and this is resulting in a heightened environment impact. Already today, severe threats linked to agricultural production, such as soil degradation and desertification, together with degradation of water quality and water balance, are widely reported.

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Figure 34: Water and energy usage are tightly linked to food security. From Lawford (2016)

Tiwah has led the further development of this challenge. It was presented and discussed at the ConnectinGEO/ENEON workshop on September 23-24, 2015 in Paris, France. The challenge was also presented by Tiwah at the ENEON Side Event during the GEO week in Mexico City in November 2015.

At the Future Earth Water-Energy-Food Nexus Workshop “Assessment of the state of knowledge related to science, integrated observations, and governance in the W-E-F Nexus,” which took place in Karlsruhe, Germany, November 23-25, 2015, the Task was discussed with a broader community, which expressed interest in being involved in the challenge. Tiwah has been coordinating the task with the relevant “Future Earth” activities. At the first ENEON Steering Committee meeting in January 2016, an ENEON WG on the Food-Water-Energy nexus was established, and Tiwah is leading this WG.

A meeting of the ENEON working group was convened at the EGU meeting on April 21, 2016 in Vienna, Austria. At this meeting, it was decided to analyse existing review papers on the FWEN to identify the coordination needs for Earth observations with a particular focus on in-situ observations. This analysis identified the following gaps:

• There is a lack of collaborations across disciplines and domains linked to the FWEN;

• GEOSS has limited capabilities to support a theme-based approaches to data and product discovery;

• There are missing links between industry and science communities that are stakeholders in the FWEN.

• There are no coordination mechanism to establish links between different observing networks to address a complex issue such as the FWEN.

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Figure 35: Potential data sources for interactions of water with the food and energy sectors. From Lawford (2016)

Looking at, for example, the interaction of water with the food and energy sectors, Lawford (2016) reports a number of potential data sources and gaps (Figure 35). No data sources could be identified for water usage in biofuel production, lake water quality, thermally polluted water, and urban water demands. A challenge is associated with the implementation of climate change mitigation action in a way that benefits the FWEN and the relevant SDGs. The aim to keep CO2 emissions at a level that limits global warming to 2oC above the pre-1900 average will require CO2 reductions impacting the energy sector as well as food production and processing. At the same time, the expected increase in atmospheric CO2 will change the Earth's radiation balance and atmospheric circulations, affecting evaporation, evapotranspiration rates, precipitation patterns, extreme floods, droughts, heat waves, rates of crop growth and productivity, water availability, and water and energy use.

To monitor the targets of the Water SDG, the Global Environmental Monitoring Initiative (GEMI) has been launched and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will serve as a clearing house for information related to water use using national data submitted voluntarily to FAO's global water information system (AQUASTAT). Big data and citizen data provide important opportunities to complement the available information relevant to the FWEN and the monitoring of SDG targets. However, the strategy for exploiting these opportunities does not exist.

At regional and global levels, additional independent monitoring capabilities are needed to meet the knowledge needs associated with the FWEN and the

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relevant SDGs. A central FWEN knowledge platform could address multiple needs including those associated with the relevant SDGs.

Concerning the SDG indicators, Lawford (2016) emphasizes that these indicators focus on final results but provide limited information on how these results could be achieved. For the SDG indicators, information needs to be aggregated to the national and global scale and accumulated over several years. For the FWEN, disaggregated data are required. An open question is whether these two types of data can be brought together. Moreover, in addition to data needs, there is a need to increase modeling capabilities.

Systems have to be identified or developed that can combine modeling and observations in a way best suited to meet the needs of the FWEN and the associated SDGs.

Lawford (2016) underlined the lack of policy frameworks that explicitly address the coordination of the FWEn. The process of implementing the SDGs could be instrumental in supporting transformative changes at different levels. However, local communities and stakeholder groups have to be involved in the implementation, the processes of developing meaningful indicators, and the monitoring of progress towards the targets. The FWEN could provide guidance and options on how to achieve the relevant SDGs. For the EO communities, a question is how to provide information that could support the governments in their quest for the SDGs. For that, an environment needs to be created that enables policy development.

Lawford (2016) provided a number of recommendations, which are summarized here in slightly modified form:

• The FWEN community should develop indicators that could illustrate progress made during the implementation process and improve the coherence of the targets with respect to the goals.

• Interventions initiated by the FWEN community could be directed at SDG implementation and priority should be given to those strategies that benefit both the FWEN and the three directly associated SDGs.

• An analysis of the FWEN elements should be undertaken to assess inequalities among sectors in different countries.

• An inventory of tools for FWEN assessments should be developed and made available to efforts involved in the SDGs.

• Modified appropriate data and information systems, governance instruments and diagnostic toolboxes should be developed for the FWEN and for the SDGs.

• The FWEN community should build liaisons with international organizations and activities such as UN-Water and its High-level Panel on Water, GEO, and space agencies.

• As another example, the report published by the World Energy Council (2016) is considered here. The report addresses the FWEN from an energy point of view. Energy is found to be the second largest freshwater user after agriculture. In primary energy production (coal, oil, gas, biofuels) and in power generation (hydro, cooling), water is used all along the energy value chain. As much as 98% of the power currently produced

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needs water. The growing demands for energy, water and food are expected to increase the risks associated with the FWEN. Some of the regions that experience already today water stress are also likely to have significant population growth, changing consumption behavior, and economic growth, increasing the FWEN risks. At the same time, there is an increasing uncertainty concerning water availability resulting from climate change impacts on freshwater availability (Pachuri et al., 2014).

Data needs to reduce these uncertainties include better information on ocean temperatures, extreme weather events, and shifting weather patterns. Van Vliet et al. (2016) highlight that from 2014 to 2069, reductions in usable water capacity could impact two-thirds of the nearly 25,000 hydropower plants analyzed and more than 80\% of the more than 1,400 thermal electric power plants assessed. A lack of location-specific knowledge on water issues and a lack of modeling tools for the assessment of nexus risks impacts energy infrastructure investment decisions. The economic risks can be substantial. For example, in 2015, drought-related energy and water rationing measures resulted in sustained economic losses of more than US$ 4.3 billion for hydropower facilities in Brazil. In many areas, the lack of sound water governance, including well-defined water rights for competing users and water pricing and trading arrangements, further exacerbates the risks associated with the nexus. A key issue is cross-border cooperation. According to the World Energy Council (2016), 261 international transboundary basins cover 45% of the Earth's land surface and these basins serve 40% of the world's population and provide 60% of the Earth's entire freshwater volume. Therefore, there is a need to ensure that adequate cross-border water management frameworks are in place. The FWEN poses a systemic risk and disruptions resulting from this nexus can impact energy supply and demand for decades. In order to reduce the dependency on FWEN resources, there is a necessity to reduce the amount of water needed for energy production.

There is a potential to lower the overall water footprint of the energy sector if more power or heat were produced by renewables such as wind, photovoltaics, or natural gas, which show comparatively low water usage (International Energy Agency, 2012). However, some of the technologies highlighted as part of the low-carbon transition, such as biofuels or carbon capture and storage, which nearly doubles the water requirements of a coal power plant (Byers et al., 2014), may in fact increase water stress.

It is clear from the above discussion that there are specific data, modeling and capacity needs that are currently not met. A detailed list of gaps is included in deliverable D6.3 Gap analysis final report including prioritization.

Eliminating such effects and guaranteeing food security requires a sustainable intensification of agricultural production that is beneficial in order to minimize yield gap, by identifying the potential scope for raising average yields via optimization of spatially explicit irrigation, fertilization and application of pesticides. Aligned with this rationale is the long-term monitoring of cultivations, soils and food security essential parameters (e.g. soil degradation/acidification/moisture as well as their protection against the water

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extremes regimes (floods & drought). The collection of high-resolution information about key soil properties, the amount of plant available water, nutrients and others which largely affect crop growth remains a challenging task in order to facilitate reduced input agriculture applications.

The improved provision of EO services and improved access to that data, should be at the core of GEO activities. The systematic integration of EO data with high resolution (e.g. spatiotemporal and spectral) relying also on adequate modeling will greatly impact the level of acquired information, enable the evaluation of new service chains and methods and extraction of actionable agricultural knowledge for assessing sustainable agricultural development and food security. As a concrete, sustainable action towards improved access to space borne but also to in situ derived EO data, higher level products, and descriptive metadata, as well as knowledge on existing service chains and processing tools, could act as a catalyst for end-users to preserve soil and water resources from further degradation and adapt the appropriate agro-technical activities accordingly to microclimatic conditions, securing the abundance of healthy crops and yield production yearly. All these will facilitate further the perspective of variable rate application, according to which, agricultural inputs are applied in controlled amounts to the specific parts of the field that requires them.

2.6.1 References

Byers, E., Hall, J. W., & Amezaga, J.M., 2014. Electricity generation and cooling water use: UK pathways to 2050, Global Environmental Change, 25}, 16-30, doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.01.005.

International Energy Agency, 2012. Water for energy, Tech. Rep., International Energy Agency.

Lawford, R., 2016. Possible directions for integration: The WEF nexus and SDGS. Presentation given at the 5th GEOSS Science and Technology Stakeholder Workshop, December 10-11, 2016, Berkeley, Ca, USA.

Pachauri, R. K., Allen, M. R., Barros, V. R., et al., 2014. Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II, and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), IPCC.

van Vliet, M. T. H., Wiberg, D., Leduc, S., & Riahi, K., 2016. Power-generation system vulnerability and adaptation to changes in climate and water resources, Nature Climate Change, 6, 375-380.

World Energy Council, 2016. The road to resilience - managing the risks of the energy-food-water-nexus, Tech. rep., World Energy Council, London, UK.