Abstract
The energy-water-land nexus represents a critical leverage future policies must draw upon to reduce trade-offs between sustainable development objectives. Yet, existing long-term planning tools do not provide the scope or level of integration across the nexus to unravel important development constraints. Moreover, existing tools and data are not always made openly available or are implemented across disparate modeling platforms that can be difficult to link directly with modern scientific computing tools and databases. In this paper, we present the NExus Solutions Tool (NEST): a new open modeling platform that integrates multi-scale energy-water-land resource optimization with distributed hydrological modeling. The new approach provides insights into the vulnerability of water, energy and land resources to future socioeconomic and climatic change and how multi-sectoral policies, technological solutions and investments can improve the resilience and sustainability of transformation pathways while avoiding counterproductive interactions among sectors. NEST can be applied at different spatial and temporal resolutions, and is designed specifically to tap into the growing body of open-access geospatial data available through national inventories and the Earth system modeling community. A case study analysis of the Indus River basin in south Asia demonstrates the capability of the model to capture important interlinkages across system transformation pathways towards the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, including the intersections between local and regional transboundary policies and incremental investment costs from rapidly increasing regional consumption projected over the coming decades.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1095-1121 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Geoscientific Model Development |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 11 2020 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
Acknowledgements. The authors acknowledge the Global Environment Facility (GEF) for funding the development of this research as part of the Integrated Solutions for Water, Energy, and Land (ISWEL) project (GEF contract agreement 6993), and the support of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). Part of this research was developed during the Young Scientists Summer Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), with financial support from the IIASA Annual Fund. The research has also been supported by the University of Victoria’s Building Connections internal grant, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Internal support was provided by the Center for Water Informatics & Technology (WIT) at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan, and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pes-soal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES). The hydrological model development was partly funded by the Belmont Forum Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative’s Food–Water–Energy Nexus theme, for which coordination and research were supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant ICER/EAR-1829999 to Stanford University, and by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency under the FUSE project funded to IIASA (grant agreement 730254).
