The household Carbon-Food-Energy-Water Nexus options of global cities for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract:

Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations, the Goal 2, Goal 6, Goal 7 and Goal 13 are targeted on food, water, energy subsystems and climate change, specifically. End-use demand is the crucial driver of the resource systems to provide the ‘upstream’ systems leverage effects which is closely related to the improvement of efficiency as well as the reduction of waste and emission required in the SDGs. Therefore, demand-side measures play a critical role in meeting the SDGs. Special attention should be paid on the household sector because it shares a large contribution of resources consumption as well as CO₂ emissions, the trends of which are also all on the rise due to the rapid urbanization and the unstainable lifestyles. What’s more, the interactions among the goals are not considered in the target setting, which will underestimate the trade-offs and synergies when focusing on individual SDG. Therefore, it is urgent to provide a new trajectory for households to ensure the realization of SDGs, by employing the nexus approach. We aim to develop the household Carbon-Food-Energy-Water (CFEW) nexus dynamic models according to the geographical and cultural characteristics for six global cities in order to emphasize resource efficiency increase and emission reduction through technological, behavioral or educational options on the household side. Different polices are also considered in this paper to discover the best choice for each specific city to achieve the SDGs. This tool is capable of providing long-term simulations from 2010 to 2050 to quantitatively estimate the potential resources efficiency increase and carbon emissions reduction of different diet patterns, diverse household appliances as well as residential behaviors under possible management strategies. On this basis, some suggestions based on the simulation results are provided.