Mapping the evolution of the water-energy-food-ecosystem (WEFE) nexus: A comprehensive review of the methods, scales, and sustainability challenges

Abstract

Worldwide crises related to water, energy, food, and ecosystems are expected in the future. Although a number of studies have focused on the water-energy-food-ecosystem (WEFE) nexus, a comprehensive review that integrates bibliometric patterns, methodological approaches, and multi-scale applications within a unified WEFE framework remains lacking. To address this gap, this study applies the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) systematic review protocol and conducts bibliometric and content analyses of publications from 2010 to 2024. The results show a steady increase in WEFE-related studies and a paradigm shift from the traditional water-energy-food (WEF) triad toward a four-component framework that explicitly incorporates ecosystems. Moreover, the WEF nexus remains a central research theme. Methodological approaches can be categorized into quantitative assessment, simulation and prediction, and integrated management; however, most rely on static analysis and therefore cannot sufficiently capture dynamic feedbacks. Scale-based analysis indicates that regional and urban studies dominate the field and focus on resource integration and internal resource management optimisation, respectively, whereas transboundary-scale research remains limited. This review is the first to systematically synthesize the conceptual evolution, methodological pathways, and scale-specific challenges of the WEFE nexus within a unified paradigm. Moreover, this review identifies key directions for future research, including framework standardization, multi-source data integration, and scale-appropriate governance strategies, thereby providing theoretical insights and empirical support for advancing sustainable WEFE nexus research.

Keywords

Water-energy-food-ecosystem nexus / Comprehensive case studies / Geographic scale / Sustainable development / Systematic review

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xiyan Wang: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis. Weili Duan: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Shan Zou: Writing – review & editing, Supervision. Zhonghao Zhang: Writing – review & editing, Data curation. Wei Wei: Writing – review & editing, Data curation. Meiqing Feng: Data curation. Yanfeng Di: Data curation. Chengkun Li: Data curation.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB0720400), the Xinjiang Tianshan Talent High Level Leading Talent Project (Grant No. 2022TSYCLJ0012 and Grant No. 2023TSYCLJ0050), and the National Youth Talent Project (Grant No. E4150103).

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