On water security, sustainability, and the water-food-energy-climate nexus

Abstract

The role of water security in sustainable development and in the nexus of water, food, energy and climate interactions is examined from the starting point of the definition of water security offered by Grey and Sadoff. Much about the notion of security has to do with the presumption of scarcity in the resources required to meet human needs. The treatment of scarcity in mainstream economics is in turn examined, therefore, in relation to how each of us as individuals reconciles means with ends, a procedure at the core of the idea of sustainable development. According to the Grey-Sadoff definition, attaining water security amounts to achieving basic, single-sector water development as a precursor of more general, self-sustaining, multi-sectoral development. This is consistent with the way in which water is treated as “first among equals”, i.e. privileged, in thinking about what is key in achieving security around the nexus of water, food, energy and climate. Cities, of course, are locations where demands for these multiple resource-energy flows are increasingly being generated. The paper discusses two important facets of security, i.e., diversity of access to resources and services (such as sanitation) and resilience in the behavior of coupled human-built-natural systems. Eight quasi-operational principles, by which to gauge nexus security with respect to city buildings and infrastructure, are developed.

Keywords

cities as forces for good / diversity / energy and nutrient recovery / green economy / infrastructure failure / resilience

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Acknowledgements

The work on which this paper is based is part of an international, inter-disciplinary network of research — the CFG Network (www.cfgnet.org). CFG was begun in 2006, enabled through the appointment at that time of Michael Bruce Beck as an Institute Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria. We readily acknowledge this stimulus to our work. Throughout, CFG has been funded by the Wheatley-Georgia Research Alliance Endowed Chair in Water Quality and Environmental Systems at the University of Georgia, in particular, in support of a Graduate Assistantship and now Postdoctoral Fellowship for Rodrigo Villarroel Walker. The freedom of enquiry enabled through this form of financial support has simply been invaluable.

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