Hi WEF-Nexus group,
Most of the WEF-Nexus studies, talks about water footprints. Of course they talk about ecological and carbon footprints also. But in most of the ecological footprints studies, water footprints will be a part.
But my question is:
- If we assess the water footprint of food, the resultant water footprints, what we get from assessment, Can it be the nexus between water and food ?
- And , if we talk about nexus between food and water, should we include energy (energy footprint consumed to prepare the food) also, then only it called as FOOD and WATER Nexus ?
- What is the difference between Water footprints and Water Nexus ?
Please help me to clear these doubts
Thanks in advance
Regards
Dagani.
In my opinion Water Footprint is an indicator that shows how much is (high or low) the footprint of a food chain. Thanks to Water footprint we can compare different diets or different way of production or different foodcrops. There is a quite large literature about how to calculate WF and the different water type grey...blue and green.
Moreover the detailed description of water footprint (component by component) could be useful to understand a part of the WEF nexus
WEF nexus is more a "new paradigma" that invite us to take into account how much is important the connection between water energy and food and that we have to manage them together so we have to avoid to analyze water and food link or energy and water link but we have to assume a larger perspective and focus our attention on all three issues together taking into account that any (eg) irrigation projetcs for food production must take into account the energy issues in terms of optimization, savings and renewable use. So whenever we are doing projects, Investments and/or planning new water reservoir and so on we have to try to optimize the use of energy for water pumping and distribution, we have to improve irrigation systems to save water.
In my opinion wef is not an indicator but is a "vision" a point of view that must move us to better understand interconnection beetween different issues and try to find the best balance to ensue a long term sustainability of our project or investment.
I hope my point of view could be useful for you!
Dear Dagani,
I'll try to give more information regarding this subject.
First, a few concepts to address your questions:
Article Water-energy-food nexus: Concepts, questions and methodologies
(which by the way is, in my opinion, the most useful review paper of the nexus so far), there are two nexus concepts in the literature: the nexus as the (i) framework that studies the "interactions among different subsystems (or sectors) within the nexus system group that aims to quantify", and the (ii) "analysis approach to quantify the links between the nexus nodes (i.e., water, energy and food)". Thus, there is a large range of room for the researchers to use this concept. This is why you can find a large number of researches using the WEF concept for different types of assessments (from policy-making to very fundamental research in chemistry or physics).Article The Water Footprint of Humanity
). It serves as an indicator of freshwater consumption. The WF has been used as the tool to quantify the water appropriation for Water-Food, Water-Energy, and Water-Energy-Food nexus approaches.Now, in terms of your specific questions:
Hope this helps to solve your doubts around the subject.
Santiago
Dear Santiago D. Vaca J.
I am very thankful to you for showing your interest on my question to give a detailed reply with patience.
Regards,
Dagani.
Footprint implies "impact". Like carbon footprint of 1 CH4 molecule differs from 1 CO2 molecule. In the context of water, the impact is local rather than global as is considered in the carbon-space. For example, impact of green water is different if consumed for maintaining environmental flows than using all the water at the agricultural site. The standard LCA methodology gives impacts, whereas the work of Hoekstra (WFN) quantifies water appropriation not how it impacts local water-balance. To quantify impacts, the WFN database is usually integrated with water-scarcity or other qualitative indicators. For complete details, see ISO14046 of WF methodology.
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