Water, Energy, Food and Nexus' Weaknesses

The water, food, energy and environment (WFEE) Nexus has recently gained attention from researchers and policymakers. This paper reviews the WFEE Nexus articles. Google Scholar search engine was used for the survey.  By examining the articles, we found that 48 articles focused on this approach. Our systematic review found that existing nexus tools rarely used social science methods and failed to apply replicable methods. Our review indicates that  The environment was considered in the nexus after 2017.  The term “Environment”  was only mentioned in 14% of these articles (Fig.1). In articles, we found close synonyms to “Environment,” such as “Earth”; “Ecosystem,” but also the term “Climate.” WFEE approach survey the interdependencies between water demand sectors and social, economic and environmental changes in water resource and demand management. WFEE is a water-centred approach. Based on the (Zhang et al., 2019) study, it is necessary to strengthen the interaction between resources management in different sectors in a structured way. Otherwise, actions in one system of resources will affect another system of resources.  Hence, the value of WFEE for coproducing adaptation scenarios (Momblanch et al., 2019).  Applying the nexus is complex as it needs many inputs and tools for capturing nexus interactions (Albrecht et al., 2018a; Kaddoura and el Khatib, 2017). In order to accomplish this, it is necessary to use methods from various disciplines (Albrecht et al., 2018a), depending on the analysis's aim, scope, and scale. An integrated systems perspective is enhanced by a multidisciplinary approach(Al-Saidi and Elagib, 2017; Khan et al., 2018), which facilitates sector-specific decision-making and planning. The WFEE has been analyzed using a wide range of modelling tools. There are some tools, such as WEAP (Sieber, 2006) and OSeMOSYS (Akute and Cannone, 2022), that follow a silo-based approach in which only one element of nexus is considered (Albrecht et al., 2018b; Leck et al., 2015; Smajgl et al., 2016). while other integrative application like MuSIASEM [44] combines the three modules, food, energy and Water (Fig.2). A significant gap is the lack of attention to the dynamic concept and the interaction between the components. To assess the effects of climate change, most studies combined various hydrological models, such as hydro-economic models,HEM (Bekchanov et al.,2019), WAEP, LHMs (Monteagudo et al., 2022), with IPCC scenarios. However, downscaling IPCC scenario output with different models is a relatively confident technique for climate data and water resources at the basin level (Yoosefdoost et al., 2022), incorporating this downscale output into the environment models are challenging. It is a big limitation to assess one section of the environment without considering the impact of the other parts. The environment is a complex system with all its parts interconnected. Moreover, since several factors affect the environment, using downscaled data on the environment reduces the reliability of the results. To address these issues, the article (Correa-Cano et al., 2022) proposes a conceptual structure for the WEFE modelling package, a system dynamic model combining hydraulic, environmental, and economic models(Fig.3).

Keywords: WFEE, weaknesses