Downscaling global land-use/cover change scenarios for regional analysis of food, energy, and water subsystems
Food, energy, and water are essential for life. In modern society, it is difficult to imagine describing the process by which essential nutrients move from the earth to the ordinary person’s dinner plate without speaking anything of energy being used to make fertilizer, water being pumped to irrigate cropland, or fuel being used to move food to the grocery store. The interactions among food, energy, and water (FEW) in the face of scarcity define the FEW nexus (Hoff, 2011). Over the last decade, nexus thinking has become the paradigm for discussion around sustainable development and resource security on the global stage (Leck et al., 2015). Examples include the World Economic Forum’s Water Initiative report (WEF Water Initiative, 2011), the International Institute for Sustainable Development report on FEW security (Bizikova et al., 2013), and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (Weitz, 2014).