The Food–Energy–Water Nexus: Security,Sustainability,and Systems Perspectives

Food, energy, and water (FEW) remain critical resources essential to sustain a reliable and secure future that is environmentally sound and supports economic growth and development. These resources are under increasing pressure due to population growth, climate change, economic development, and shifting consumption patterns. Over the past decade, the FEW nexus has emerged as a field of study to build greater understandings around the interconnections and interdependencies among these three resources (Hoff, 2011; Al-Saidi and Elagib, 2017; Scanlon et al., 2017). As the environmental engineering and science (EES) community evaluates the changing role of our field (Vikesland, 2017; NASEM, 2019), FEW nexus research has the potential to contribute to interdisciplinary efforts to provide new knowledge for improving the security and sustainability of FEW systems. This special issue of Environmental Engineering Science, titled “The Food–Energy–Water Nexus: Security, Sustainability, and Systems Perspectives,” explores the cutting edge of these interdisciplinary efforts. As the National Academies recent consensus study report has articulated, sustainably supplying food, water, and energy remains a critical challenge of the 21st century that environmental engineers are well prepared to help advance (NASEM, 2019).

The approaches to researching the FEW nexus largely depend on the perspective of the research team. To broadly highlight this variation, when a researcher or research team adopts a water perspective, the food and energy systems become users of the resource. When adopting a food perspective, water and energy systems are resource requirements; finally from an energy perspective, water can be considered as input and food could be both an input and output. Moreover, the interactions between FEW resources can arise from many different causes from simple interactions—such as the need to irrigate crops in areas with inadequate rainfall—to highly complex dependencies such as the effects of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels and shifting land-use patterns. This variation presents challenges and critiques of how knowledge can be used by decision-makers and how we may structure our modeling approaches (Hellegers et al., 2008; Bazilian et al., 2011; Wichelns, 2017). Across the spectrum, this special issue furthers the discourse on FEW research by advancing three themes: (1) new methodological approaches for FEW modeling, (2) furthering theoretical dialogue, and (3) showcasing theory into practice through experiments.

This special issue includes eight contributions from three research themes. First are four articles advancing modeling approaches to understanding FEW inequalities. Bozeman III et al. (2019) begin this special issue through their exploration of the correlation between food consumption spending choices and FEW impacts by race and ethnicity across the United States. In doing so, the authors establish an innovative methodology that integrates life-cycle approaches with socioeconomic status demography. Expanding the global FEW dialogue, this section also includes two articles that evaluate different geographic boundaries in China (Liu et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2019) and one article that investigates sugarcane production in Ethiopia (Silalertruksa et al., 2019). Moving to theory, we have two articles aimed at furthering theoretical understandings of the FEW nexus. First, Babaie et al. (2019) present an ontology to describe connections between FEW system elements, both from a natural (physical) perspective, but also from social and governance perspective, to address multiscale multitemporal processes. Using a mixed method approach, Oerther et al. (2019) then present how research on structural equation modeling can be enhanced using community-based participatory research, structured reviews, mixed methods, and professional education at the nexus of food, water, and health. Finally, the third section showcases two examples of how theories across the FEW nexus can be put into practice through showcasing nutrient recovery from wastewater for sustainable food projection (Theregowda et al., 2019) and decision-making for islanded microgrid communities in Alaska (Whitney et al., 2019).

We hope that this special issue can contribute to the EES community new ideas for scholarly pursuit, bridging disciplines and domains to further FEW understanding. These studies can increase understanding and improve modeling efforts of the interdependencies between FEW resources and promote research efforts that better enable sustainable management of these critical resources. In closing, we thank all of the authors for their contributions and EES Editor Domenico Grasso for his longstanding support of this effort.