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.