Energy-water-food Nexus And Cooperative Control

Energy,water and food are the crucial resources to meet human demands,and play important roles in country development and social stabilization.In 2011,the World Economic Forum identified the "water-food-energy risk" as a key risk that would affect the globe in the following 10 years.The demands for energy,water,and food are likely to increase due to the economic development,population growth,and urbanization.It is necessary to make tradeoffs among these three systems since they are all the cornerstones of sustainable development.Therefore,an integration of energy,water,and food systems is required to look at the nexus of these systems and investigate the approaches towards their synergistic development.This study assessed the energy,water,and food consumption based on the traditional economic input-output analysis from the perspectives of both primary producers and final consumers.The results show that estimates differ between the assessments based on the two perspectives above.Each sector plays different roles across resources(i.e.energy,water,and food).In addition,a physical input-output modelling,which can depict the nexus among resources without being affected the changing prices of products,was proposed at city level to investigate the energy-water-food nexus.This model was applied into a case study on the energy-water-food resources in Detroit,a city of the USA.Based on the results of input-out analyses,a structural path analysis was carried out to recognize the critical paths that connects the flow of energy,water,and food resources.The results show that the indirect way accounts for a large portion of resources consumption.A betweenness-based analysis was conducted to assess the resources flow among sectors,indicating that the results can differ greatly across the betweenness-based,primary producer-based,and final consumer-based analyses.It is necessary to study the nexus of these resources from multiple perspectives that mentioned above to identify the critical sectors comprehensively.Finally,a multi-objective optimization model was proposed to investigate the potential synergies among the conservation of energy,water,and food systems considering the stable economic output and continuous GDP growth.The results show that the adjustment of industrial structure can effectively improve the water and food conservation while ensuring GDP growth,but have limited positive effects on energy conservation.The reduction of input into critical sectors plays a important role in the synergistic conservation of energy,water and food resources.