Understanding the Impacts of Climate Change and Socio-economic Development on the Food-energy-water Nexus

Abstract:

Food, energy, and water are important resources for the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). These three resources and their interlinkages – FEW Nexus could be affected significantly by both climate change and socio-economic development, whose combined impact is still not well understood. Mekong River Delta (MRD) was chosen as the study area, and rice yield, power generation, and water withdrawal were used to quantify the combined impact of climate change and socio-economic development on the FEW Nexus by adopting an integrated resources management model. Model inputs were from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) to represent the plausible combinations of climate change and socio-economic development scenarios. In general, rice yields were projected to increase due to technical improvement, but more low-yield years were also projected due to future extreme climate events. Socio-economic development will cause a sharp increase in power generation, especially from coal-fired power plants. As a result, water withdrawal for irrigation will decrease due to the increased precipitation during growing seasons, and withdrawal for the cooling purpose of the coal-fired plants will increase significantly. Further, strong relationships in the food-water and energy-water were found using Nexus analysis, and this finding revealed that water is a central resource that connects the food and energy sectors in MRD. Finally, regional sustainability analysis indicated that climate change and socio-economic development both affect regional sustainability through FEW Nexus significantly, and the energy and water sectors will be more vulnerable than the food sector. In summary, this research integrates food, water, energy, and nexus information to provide a comprehensive understanding of the climate change and socio-economic development impacts, and the framework can be also applied to the other regions that face similar issues.