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In the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations worldwide pledged emissions reductions (Nationally Determined Contributions—NDCs) to avert the threat of climate change, and agreed to periodically review these pledges to strengthen their level of ambition. Previous studies have analyzed NDCs largely in terms of their implied contribution to limit global warming, their implications on the energy sector or on mitigation costs. Nevertheless, a gap in the literature exists regarding the understanding of implications of the NDCs on countries’ Energy-Water-Land nexus resource systems. The present paper explores this angle within the regional context of Latin America by employing the Global Change Assessment Model, a state-of-the-art integrated assessment model capable of representing key system-wide interactions among nexus sectors and mitigation policies. By focusing on Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia, we stress potential implications on national-level water demands depending on countries’ strategies to enforce energy-related emissions reductions and their interplays with the land sector. Despite the differential implications of the Paris pledges on each country, increased water demands for crop and biomass irrigation and for electricity generation stand out as potential trade-offs that may emerge under the NDC policy. Hence, this study underscores the need of considering a nexus resource planning framework (known as “Nexus Approach”) in the forthcoming NDCs updating cycles as a mean to contribute toward sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the next few decades increasing and shifting populations, urbanization, technological advances, pollution and climate change will all contribute to increased stress on limited water, energy, and land resources in several regions across the world. It is becoming increasingly clear that the feedback between these different sectors are critical and that planners and decision makers need to account for the inter-sectoral dependencies in order to capitalize on key opportunities as well as avoid unforeseen challenges which may be ignored when using single-sector approaches. In addition to cross-sectoral linkages, equally important is the spatial scale at which the resources are analyzed and managed, both because of the inherent characteristics of each resource as well as the administrative or legislative boundaries over which decisions are made and implemented. As sectoral planners adopt integrated planning approaches, a key challenge is collecting, harmonizing and synchronizing data across sectors and at decision-relevant spatial scales from large multinational regions to river sub-basins.This study seeks to contribute to this integrated panning challenge by introducing a new framework which offers planners a tool to analyze cross-sector dynamics at decision-relevant spatial scales. The framework is designed to utilize data from various models operating at different resolutions so as to capture both broader global dynamics across a range of earth and human systems (as usually done in global integrated assessment models), as well as finer-resolution sector-specific models which may capture details outside the scope of coarse-scale integrated assessment models. All data is harmonized to the spatial boundaries of interest to the stakeholder and then inter-sectoral and inter-regional links are captured via technological and trade input-output matrices. Impacts of policies and changes in one sector can then be tracked across other sectors and regions.In partnership with various government ministries and universities in Latin America, several case studies are designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the framework to analyze how various policies of interest and socio-economic changes influence the evolution of national and sub-national energy, water, and land systems in the context of a changing climate. The resulting sectoral synergies, conflicts and investment needs carry important implications for national resource management and infrastructure planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]