Gateway to the perspectives of the Food-Energy-Water nexus

The Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus has been promoted as a tool for improving food, energy, and water resource security via an interdisciplinary approach that acknowledges the inherent synergies and tradeoffs involved in managing these resources. Over the past decade discussion of the nexus has increased rapidly, along with research funding and output. However, because the nexus encompasses so many different disciplines, researchers engage with and study the nexus from differing perspectives with distinct motivations and analytical methodologies. Understanding these motivations is critical to understanding the value of a given work. This paper first uses a narrative review to identify the motivations and toolsets of five key perspectives used to view the nexus, including: ecosystem health, waste management, public and private institutional change, stakeholder trust, and the learning process. Then, a systematic review is conducted to examine how publication trends have changed over the past decade, both generally and for each of these perspectives. The Food-Energy-Water nexus is not the first systems-based approach for addressing resource management and critiques of the nexus as a Buzzword or simply a reinvention of previous systems are growing in the literature. Challenging authors to explicitly define the role and motivations of their research within the broader category of the FEW nexus can improve the actionability of the research, better allow researchers to build from each other's work and help reduce the ambiguity surrounding the nexus. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus has gained increasing attention over the past decade, with discussions and research funding on the rise. The nexus is approached from various perspectives with different motivations and analytical methodologies, making it important to understand these motivations to evaluate the value of the research.