Gateway to the perspectives of the Food-Energy-Water nexus

Abstract

The Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus has been promoted as a tool for improving food, energy, and water resource security via an interdisciplinary approach that acknowledges the inherent synergies and tradeoffs involved in managing these resources. Over the past decade discussion of the nexus has increased rapidly, along with research funding and output. However, because the nexus encompasses so many different disciplines, researchers engage with and study the nexus from differing perspectives with distinct motivations and analytical methodologies. Understanding these motivations is critical to understanding the value of a given work. This paper first uses a narrative review to identify the motivations and toolsets of five key perspectives used to view the nexus, including: ecosystem health, waste management, public and private institutional change, stakeholder trust, and the learning process. Then, a systematic review is conducted to examine how publication trends have changed over the past decade, both generally and for each of these perspectives. The Food-Energy-Water nexus is not the first systems-based approach for addressing resource management and critiques of the nexus as a "Buzzword" or simply a reinvention of previous systems are growing in the literature. Challenging authors to explicitly define the role and motivations of their research within the broader category of the FEW nexus can improve the actionability of the research, better allow researchers to build from each other's work, and help reduce the ambiguity surrounding the nexus.

Keywords: Food-energy–water nexus; Life cycle assessment; Problem archetype; Resource governance; Systems thinking; Water security.