The link for sustainable development

After blogging for three months, I have come across multiple research papers, newspaper articles, videos and conference papers that have enlarged my knowledge of the importance of considering the water-energy-food nexus to achieve sustainable development in Africa. My main objective was to put all the information gathered from the resources mentioned above into the entries of the blog to give a wide and deep analysis of this cutting-edge topic.

I decided to focus on this topic because my first impression was that the Nexus approach is the way forward and the final crucial connection to achieve development in a continent shaken by climate change and I hope I have proven that this is true. Although there is still a lot of research and evidence needed, the water-energy-food nexus approach is uncovering the links between the most vulnerable aspects to the changes that climate change will generate. This will give us the basis to develop solutions that are in harmony with nature and that will help to build a resilient society prepared and adapted to the challenging future.

Pathway to a sustainable future

Throughout the blog, there has been a clear focus on the Water-Energy-Food nexus and I hope it is clear by now that this approach is a clear step forward towards achieving environmental security. However, an article published by the Environmental Science & Policy Journal that presents a critical review of the nexus argues that it has failed to incorporate sustainable livelihoods perspectives. This is somehow contradictory because to achieve sustainable development livelihoods are essential.

Environmental livelihood security

The main problem lies in the fact that most of the Nexus literature is based on top-down, macro-level drivers of consumption. Moreover, the Nexus framework has focused exclusively in technical assessments rather than including other livelihood-related factors such as population dynamics. The article mentioned above presents a framework that incorporates livelihoods in the water-energy-food nexus called “Environmental livelihood security” (ELS). “The ELS of a system is met when a balance is achieved between human demand on the environment and environmental impacts on humans” (Environmental Science & Policy, 2015). In this way, the ELS adds the human security side to the environmental security that was already included in the Nexus approach. The principal changes this framework makes regarding the Nexus approach are:

• It includes the interaction between each of the environmental components with livelihoods. E.g. For the water-livelihood interaction, water is needed to support livelihood activities and livelihoods contribute to the preservation or depletion of the water supplies.
• There is a shift from top down to bottom up analysis:  It incorporates primary research to the use of national statistics. This is done, for example, by interviews, focus groups, ranking exercises that reveal connections that national surveys don't.
• It accounts for external pressure that may disrupt the balance. For example, climatological factors such as earthquakes or heavy rains.

Population growth

A paper by the World Economics forum, “The missing link in sustainable development: A call to integrate population in the water, food, energy nexus” agrees with the fact that there is a need for integrating population and demographics into the water-energy-food nexus, but puts a special emphasis on the inclusion of global population trends (e.g. population growth). It argues that, if we just focus on the technical assessment of the components of the Nexus framework, then we will fail to promote a more sustainable behaviour. This will increase the pressures on the natural resources and threaten environmental security. Furthermore, it claims that excluding livelihoods from the nexus will also challenge the capacity to adapt to climate change, encourage migration and increase the risk of political instability.

 The ways in which analysing population trends can help sustainable development are:

• Educating the population to switch to more resource-efficient behaviour
• Address population dynamics. This can be done for example by
• Educating and empowering young woman can allow them to make their own choice and reduce population growth as a consequence. This enables governments to promote more sustainable growth.
•  Addressing migration: shits from reacting to migration to planning migration can lead to energy savings in housing and transport, and water savings as infrastructure would be more efficient.

Bottom-up approaches

There is a very interesting entry in the blog of the Water Energy Food Resources Website called “From the Centralized Past to a Resilient Future” by Dr. Peter Bosshard that draws on what the Environmental livelihood security considers about the need of a shift from top-down to bottom-up approaches. Dr. Bosshard explores this with an example related to water security.

 In order to achieve water security we need to integrate it to climate resilience. Looking at storing water, large dams are no longer the best option for two reasons:

• Climate change will already put pressure on freshwater resources, therefore, dams will only worsen the situation
• Dams are big infrastructures that lack the ability to adapt to rapid changes in stream flows due to change in climate. There are already examples of countries such as Tanzania that are hydropower dependent and are already suffer the consequences of the inadaptability of this to the climate.

In order to build climate resilience structure, a shift towards small-scale participatory solutions is needed that are less costly and have a minimal environmental impact. Now, there is only a need for financial, scientific and legal support for this to develop and become the approach of the future and move away from the centralised past.

Personal discussion and conclusions

 I believe that in order for small-scale initiatives to be successful, we first need an assessment of the interactions between the natural components (water, energy, food) and the population to create greater sustainable growth. Likewise, the Environmental Livelihood Security approach adds that last component the Nexus approach was lacking of. However, I think that for the ELS to be an applicable and practical framework, the nexus approach needs to be more developed and to have numerous of practical applications from which we can draw conclusions first. This is due to the fact that the ELS draws upon the Nexus approach.

A nexus assessment of water, energy and food security in Ethiopia

This entry is going to show a practical assessment of the water-food-energy approach in Ethiopia. This assessment has been done by the Nexus Resource Platform and it is a very clear way to show and understand what this nexus concept is all about. Although I will be talking about the most important points of the report, the complete paper can be found in the following link: Ethiopia: Nexus Country Profile

Please have a look at it if you have time because it's a very clear piece of work. A similar assessment has been done for other countries such as Egypt and Sudan so if you are interested in this topic please have a look at it as well. 

After spending more than 2 months researching and writing about this cutting-edge concept in a more theoretical way, coming across to such a clear and easy to understand paper about the practical aspect of the Nexus was very fascinating. The article reserves one page for each element of the Nexus and then continues by doing a rapid assessment of the overall situation. 

Water:

- Water sources: the average rainfall is 848 mm/a but the temporal distribution is described as “highly erratic, extreme spatial and temporal variability with rainfall variation coefficient of 0.12 to 0.97”.

- Access to improved water and sanitation is very low overall and most of the water withdrawal comes from the agricultural sector (93,69%). 

- Water for Energy

• Most of the electricity generation comes from hydropower plants but only 2 out of 9 dams are used for generating electricity
• Due to the high availability of water, the government is now interested in promoting the production of bioenergy and “vast tracts of land are granted to foreign companies for production and export to European countries.

-        Water for Land

• Ethiopian agriculture is highly dependant on rainfall and only 1% of the total agricultural area is irrigated due to a lack of technology development, therefore Ethiopia is not able to fulfil the national food demand.

Energy

- Most of the energy production comes from waste and biofuels and electricity production comes from hydropower plants as mentioned above. 

- Overall, the residential sector is the most energy demanding one (93% of overall energy use)

- Energy for water: Rural areas normally lack of electricity access and water is extracted with hand wells or petrol driven wells. Therefore, gravity driven distribution network are installed and pumps are not commonly used.

- Energy for land: Energy use in agriculture represents only 0,3% of total energy consumption, which surprisingly contrasts with the importance of the contribution of agriculture to the GDP (46%). This is due to the low mechanisation of agriculture and the reliance on rain-fed systems. 

Land

- Agricultural activities are normally small-scale, rain-fed and not mechanised

- Yields are very low and it is very dependant on external food aid

- Land for water: The accessible surface area covered by dams is 720 km² The Grand Renaissance Dam under construction shall cover an area of 1900 km². Two of them are used for irrigation.

- Land for energy: 2 bio m2 of soil in conjunction of 200,000 ha of forest cover are lost annually due to wide use of fuel wood in the rural areas. 

Possible solutions and overall assessment

- Water is the most worrying aspect of all. With increasing droughts, the government has to focus on increasing water storage for safe water drinking and sanitation. 

- Increasing rural electricity access will also help achieving both food and water security as it will improve the crop yield and will facilitate the extraction of water for drinking and sanitation. 

The following graphs have been directly taken from the report and summarise the positive and negative aspects of the three features of the Nexus.

Personal discussion and conclusions

Looking at Ethiopia, I feel like the government has concentrated its efforts into hydropower to an extent that it has completely forgotten about the other aspects that also sustain a country. For instance, the energy security assessment rating clearly shows how the government has spend most of its funding in building the infrastructure and promoting hydropower and biofuels but has completely forgotten about the access to electricity and energy in the rural areas. At the same time, it can be seen how food security hasn't either been a priority for the government as crop productivity and the access to markets are very low. I can’t deny that Ethiopia has done a great job with improving grid electricity access but for me it does not seem enough. It’s time for the government to shift its effort to guarantee the country’s sustainability and achieve water, energy and food security.

In terms of the report, I believe that the Nexus Resource Platform has done an excellent work in terms of adapting the information to a very visual and easy to understand structure. However, after explaining the current situation, I think that it should have given more importance to the possible solutions section since it's the most challenging one. Although I agree it is importance to reveal the current scenario, more effort should be placed into developing solutions for the problems in the water-food-energy nexus in Ethiopia.