Considering agricultural wastes and ecosystem services in Food-Energy-Water-Waste Nexus system design

<p>Fast population growth and economic development in several African countries is driving large infrastructure investments for growing energy, food and water demands which will likely strain existing ecosystem services.&#160; To minimize negative impacts and guarantee long-term success and sustainability of these investments,&#160; careful management and temporal planning of existing and new infrastructure is required. Our study focuses on the Zambezi River Basin (ZRB), a transboundary system supporting key economic growth and poverty reduction across its multiple riparian countries, while sustaining essential ecosystem services. &#160;The ZRB currently encompasses five hydropower dams, with three additional dams planned. The goal of this study is to generate efficient pathways that allow the temporal sequencing of planned dam projects along with robust management strategies that balance food, energy and environmental demands. A participatory approach is adopted at an early stage by running a Negotiation Simulation Lab (NSL) to elicit stakeholders&#8217; preferences and concerns supporting both model development and formulation of the optimization problem. Specifically, the pathway design is structured in three stages: first, optimal control policies are generated using Evolutionary Multi-objective Direct Policy Search for all possible combinations of dams projects; the time of construction is subsequently optimized, including the update of the system operation when a new dam is built, by balancing the benefits and the costs of additional infrastructure investments which are activated by projections of population growth triggering higher water and energy demands, finally promising policies are tested under a broad set of irrigation demand and streamflow scenarios. Our analysis shows that the rising demands cause all the planned dams to be built within the planning horizon from 2020-2060.&#160; The study also indicates that the operational preferences are key since they dictate the system&#8217;s performance across multiple objectives and this behavior prevails under a larger suite of plausible future scenarios.&#160; Overall, our study provides a novel approach that integrates infrastructure investment planning that can be coupled with cooperative operations to meet growing regional demands while involving stakeholders in crucial stages of the decision making process.</p><p>&#160;</p>

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Planning of Food-Energy-Water-Waste (FEW2) nexus for sustainable development

BMC Chemical Engineering ◽

10.1186/s42480-020-0027-3 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Bowen Feng ◽

Koen H. van Dam ◽

Miao Guo ◽

Nilay Shah ◽

Stephen Passmore ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Sustainable Development ◽

Food Energy ◽

Water Waste

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Planning of Food-Energy-Water-Waste (FEW2) nexus for sustainable development

10.21203/rs.2.16073/v1 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Bowen Feng ◽

Koen H. van Dam ◽

Miao Guo ◽

Nilay Shah ◽

Stephen Passmore ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Supply And Demand ◽

Clean Energy ◽

Developed Countries ◽

Environmental Indicators ◽

Waste To Energy ◽

System Level ◽

Food Energy ◽

Energy Technologies ◽

Business As Usual ◽

Water Waste

Abstract It is critical for reliable infrastructure planning to address the Food-Energy-Water-Waste (FEW2) nexus at system level. This paper presents the applicability of the systematic modelling platform resilience.io across water, energy and waste sectors with focus on waste-to-energy pathway, aiming to establish the optimal FEW2 nexus based on economic and environmental indicators. A rich array of technology options, including water production facilities, clean energy technologies and waste-to-energy conversions are evaluated to meet the demand of water and energy (mainly gas and electricity), and the treatment requirement of waste and wastewater. A case study of Hunter Valley, the largest region in Australia, is presented in this study, featuring the supply and demand context of developed countries. A full set of scenarios, including business-as-usual (BAU), water and wastewater, power plant decommission, waste-to-energy and policy intervention, is created to present FEW2 nexus from the perspective of individual nodes and the whole system. The results signal the benefits of biogas and syngas generation from anaerobic digestion and gasification for waste-to-energy pathway, alongside findings in water and energy sectors. The outcome of this analysis can then form the foundation of regional planning involving relevant stakeholders, with the modelling tools supporting scenario evaluation and collaborative learning to reach consensus in view of different performance indicators.

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Ecosystem Services in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus

Change and Adaptation in Socio-Ecological Systems ◽

10.1515/cass-2015-0016 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Maksud Bekchanov ◽

Claudia Ringler ◽

Marc Mueller

Keyword(s):

Ecosystem Services ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Integrated Management ◽

Economic Activities ◽

Food Energy ◽

Societal Benefits ◽

Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽

Research Tools

AbstractGiven their substantial societal benefits, such as supporting economic activities and providing better livelihoods in rural areas, ecosystem services should gain higher importance in water-food-energy nexus debates. Yet, not all values from ecosystems are quantifiable, data is often not adequate and methods of measuring these values are not sound. This situation challenges researchers and water managers to improve research tools and give adequate attention to ecosystem services by implementing interdisciplinary approaches and integrated management of ecosystems and their services.

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