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.
