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Capturing the social dynamic processes among household members that work to shape consumption patterns presents a complex problem for household resource conservation studies. To bridge the gap between the individual and household, we propose and test a series of quantitative measures that explore the underlying structure of household social dynamic processes through the lens of social practice theory. Based on previous qualitative research, we develop measures to test five distinct social dynamic processes that either encourage or deter pro-environmental action: enhancing, norming, preferring, constraining, and allocating. In a sample of households (n = 120) from suburban Midwestern USA, we find that positively framed social dynamic processes (enhancing and positive norming) positively predict variance in frequency of food-, energy-, and water-conserving pro-environmental actions. Pro-environmental orientation of the individual respondent, in turn, is positively associated with perception of positively framed dynamics. These findings suggest that social dynamic processes influence individual decision-making about household consumption, supporting previous research that illustrates consumption as embedded within the relationships that form residential life. We suggest ways forward for quantitative social science researchers to explore consumption through a practice-based approach that considers the influence of social institutions on emission-intensive lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a lack of data on resources used and food produced at urban farms. This hampers attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of urban agriculture or craft policies for sustainable food production in cities. To address this gap, we used a citizen science approach to collect data from 72 urban agriculture sites, representing three types of spaces (urban farms, collective gardens, individual gardens), in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, and United States). We answered three key questions about urban agriculture with this unprecedented dataset: (1) What are its land, water, nutrient, and energy demands? (2) How productive is it relative to conventional agriculture and across types of farms? and (3) What are its contributions to local biodiversity? We found that participant farms used dozens of inputs, most of which were organic (e.g., manure for fertilizers). Farms required on average 71.6 L of irrigation water, 5.5 L of compost, and 0.53 m2 of land per kilogram of harvested food. Irrigation was lower in individual gardens and higher in sites using drip irrigation. While extremely variable, yields at well-managed urban farms can exceed those of conventional counterparts. Although farm type did not predict yield, our cluster analysis demonstrated that individually managed leisure gardens had lower yields than other farms and gardens. Farms in our sample contributed significantly to local biodiversity, with an average of 20 different crops per farm not including ornamental plants. Aside from clarifying important trends in resource use at urban farms using a robust and open dataset, this study also raises numerous questions about how crop selection and growing practices influence the environmental impacts of growing food in cities. We conclude with a research agenda to tackle these and other pressing questions on resource use at urban farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilience, defined as the ability of a system to adapt in the presence of a disruptive event, has been of great interest with food systems for some time now. The goal of this research was to build understanding about resilient food systems that will withstand and recover from disruptions in a way that ensures a sufficient supply of food for all. In large, developed countries such as the USA and Canada, the food supply chain relies on a complex web of interconnected systems, such as water and energy systems, and food production and distribution are still very labor-intensive. Thanks to economies of scale and effective use of limited resources, potential cost savings support a push towards a more centralized system. However, distributed systems tend to be more resilient. Although distributed production systems may not be economically justifiable than centralized ones, they may provide a more resilient alternative. This study focused on the supply-side aspects of the food system and the food system's water, energy, and workforce disruptions to be considered for the resilience assessment for the USA, with an example for the state of Texas. After the degree of centralization (DoC) was calculated, the resilience of a food system was measured. Next, the relationship between labor intensity and production of six major food groups was formulated. The example for Texas showed that the decentralization of food systems will improve their resilience in responding to energy and water disruptions. A 40 percent reduction in water supply could decrease the food system performance by 28%. A negative correlation was found between the resilience and DoC for energy disruption scenarios. A 40 percent reduction in energy supply could decrease the food system performance by 34%. In contrast, achieving a more resilient food system in responding to labor shortage supports a push towards a more centralized system the decentralization of food systems can in fact, improve their resilience in responding to disruptions in the energy and water inputs. In contrast, achieving a more resilient food system in responding to labor shortage supports a push towards a more centralized system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2018 water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa, captured the attention of international media outlets as the city faced the possibility of running out of water. Examining this media provides an opportunity to understand the framing of the water crisis, which can provide valuable insights into what society and policymakers consider important. Media analysis can also examine the framing of the impacts of the crisis; with strong interlinkages between food, energy, and water resources, the water crisis directly impacted other resource sectors. To explore the media perspective on the crisis and its impacts across the food and energy sectors, the research here uses content analysis to analyze news articles about the water crisis. We analyze the framing of the problems and solutions to the water crisis and the framing of food-energy-water nexus interactions and impacts. Our results show that the media framed the water crisis as being caused by drought, politics, poor management, and overuse of water, while it presented the proposed solutions of reducing demand and increasing water supply through technological solutions. Additionally, the media framing shows a major impact of the water crisis on the agriculture sector and a strong reliance on energy-intensive technical solutions to address the water crisis, suggesting potential unintended consequences within the food and energy sectors without direct consideration of their intersections. We conclude that the media framing may suggest a mismatch between causes and solutions, as the media rarely presented improving governance and management as potential solutions, yet identified poor governance as a cause of the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the known benefits of integrated policy and planning, traditional governance decisions in the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus are often made without cross-sector collaboration, potentially leading to unintended consequences and decreased resource security. Applying collaborative governance approaches to the FEW nexus provides an opportunity to shift towards integrated policy of food, energy, and water governance; doing so first requires an understanding of the limitations of current governance structures and the opportunities for change. We conduct a social network analysis of stakeholders in Phoenix, AZ using secondary data sources to construct the social network of collaboration and to analyze the ability of the governance landscape to facilitate or hinder collaborative governance. The social network measures indicate potential challenges to collaborative governance of FEW nexus stakeholders, such as limited trust between actors. However, leveraging bridging actors provides opportunities to increase collaborative governance between sectors. This research is important for implementing collaborative FEW nexus governance in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated energy-water-land (EWL) planning promotes synergies and avoids conflicts in ways that sector-specific planning approaches cannot. Many important decisions that influence emerging EWL nexus issues are implemented at regional (e.g., large river basin, electricity grid) and sub-regional (e.g., small river basin, irrigation district) scales. However, actual implementation of integrated planning at these scales has been limited. Simply collecting and visualizing data and interconnections across multiple sectors and sub-regions in a single modeling platform is a unique endeavor in many regions. This study introduces and applies a novel approach to linking together multiple sub-regions in a single platform to characterize and visualize EWL resource use, EWL system linkages within and among sub-regions, and the EWL nexus implications of future policies and investments. This integrated planning methodology is applied in the water-stressed Colorado River Basin in Argentina, which is facing increasing demands for agricultural and fossil fuel commodities. Guided by stakeholders, this study seeks to inform basin planning activities by characterizing and visualizing (1) the basin's current state of EWL resources, (2) the linkages between sectors within and among basin sub-regions, and (3) the EWL nexus implications of planned future agricultural development activities. Results show that water scarcity, driven in part by human demands that have historically reached 60% of total surface water supply, poses a substantial constraint to economic development in the basin. The Colorado basin has the potential to serve as a testbed for crafting novel and generalizable sub-regional EWL planning approaches capable of informing the EWL planning dialogue globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food, energy, and water (FEW) are interdependent and must be examined as a coupled natural-human system. This perspective essay defines FEW systems and outlines key findings about them as a blueprint for future models to satisfy six key objectives. The first three focus on linking the FEW production and consumption to impacts on Earth cycles in a spatially specific manner in order to diagnose problems and identify potential solutions. The second three focus on describing the evolution of FEW systems to identify risks, thus empowering the FEW actors to better achieve the goals of resilience and sustainability. Four key findings about the FEW systems that guide future model development are (1) that they engage ecological, carbon, water, and nutrient cycles most powerfully among all human systems; (2) that they operate primarily at a mesoscale best captured by counties, districts, and cities; (3) that cities are hubs within the FEW system; and (4) that the FEW system forms a complex network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus for 21 countries worldwide, with data available from year 1990-2000 in order to investigate the relationship between food production and two scarce resources: energy and water. Food production is proxied by four alternative variables: The index of agricultural production, the index of crops production, the index of livestock production and the value added from agriculture. Water and energy as independent variables are controlled by methane and nitrogen emissions, capital, labor and five versions of fertilizer proxy: pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, herbicide and other. For robust estimation, we have perused a number of standard and novel panel estimators such as the common correlated effects mean group estimator and the augmented mean group estimator (AMG). These estimators can account both for non-stationarity and the cross-dependence problems. Based on standard estimators such as the generalized least squares estimator or the Arellano-Bond generalized method of moments GMM, they reveal the existence of a significant FEW nexus while the mean group estimator, the group mean DOLS estimator, the common correlated effects and the augmented mean group estimator (AMG) do not yield significant coefficients for water and energy. In the latter models only labor and pesticides are significant at 5%. Also, the unobserved total factor productivity appears significant at 5% under the AMG estimation. When significant, energy and water elasticities ranged from − 0.001 to − 0.256 and from − 0.014 to − 0.084 respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metropolitan development in the USA has historically relied on systems of centralized infrastructure that assume a population density and level of economic activity that has not been consistently sustained in post-industrial urban landscapes. In many cities, this has resulted in dependence on systems that are environmentally, economically, and socially unsustainable. Reliance on this deteriorating social and physical infrastructure results in waste and decreased efficiencies. While numerous cities could exemplify this trend, the present work highlights two compelling cases: Detroit, Michigan and Baltimore, Maryland. The paper provides important feedback from a recent workshop held with experts of both practical and academic backgrounds from both cities. The workshop focused on sustainability of the food-energy-water nexus within the context of transitioning urban landscapes, economies, and governance processes associated with post-industrial cities. The pursuit of environmental, economic, and social sustainability-especially in relation to food, energy, and water-is particularly challenging in aged and deteriorating post-industrial urban settings, and the importance of such cities to the global economy demands that attention be focused on research and education to support this mission. Given their age, geographic locations, and complex social-ecological histories, the examination and comparison of the cities of Detroit and Baltimore in the workshop described here provided a unique opportunity for evaluation of research, education and outreach needs, and opportunities in food, energy, and water (FEW) sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much theoretical work has been put into stressing the importance of understanding the food-energy-water nexus, if this burgeoning focus of inquiry is to have any impact on development pathways, we must advance metrics to guide policy planning and action. In this paper, we outline a framework for establishing such a suite of indicators based on system science and life cycle assessment. We identify a number of considerations that should be addressed including the following: (a) scope, ranging from project level (for example, a thermoelectric power plant) through higher system network levels (industry to national to global-level analysis), and (b) the category of the metric, which is defined by two dimensions, (i) intrinsic vs. extrinsic and (ii) absolute vs. relative units, whether the metric indicates an absolute value (for example m of freshwater consumption or kWh of electricity used by a power plant) or a value relative to an industry/policy performance benchmark or some environmental indicator (e.g., available water within the basin in which our power plant is located). By understanding the scope and category of metrics derived from economic, life cycle, or other modeling and accounting methods, we understand how various stakeholders are motivated to focus on certain metrics over others. This understanding in turn creates the means to translate between metrics and models for food-energy-water planning and stakeholder collaboration. It should be noted that the primary objective of this paper is to spur discussion, rather than to flesh out a fully formed theoretical framework. We hope, however, that our efforts may prove to be of some use in the crucial discussion of food-energy-water nexus issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]