Bibliometric analysis of water-energy-food nexus: Sustainability assessment of renewable energy

Water-energy-food nexus has received global attention, as the interdependency of these resources is crucial to developing conceptual tools for environmental sustainability. Thus, water-energy-food nexus underpins economic development and improves life and well-being. We provide a critical assessment of extant literature on water-energy-food nexus using bibliometric analysis within the last 2 years. Using the keyword Water-Energy-Food from 2017 to 2020 in Scopus, data on 235 documents after preprocessing were used for further investigations. We found that scholarly research on water-energy-food nexus is expanding rapidly because of its policy implications. However, results and policy effects were heterogeneous because of a lack of a common conceptual framework of water-energy-food nexus-making the conceptual tool more challenging. Although renewable energy technologies have been described as the antidote for achieving environmental sustainability, however, a sustainability assessment revealed that while fossil fuel energy technologies compete with water withdrawal and consumption, some renewables compete with food for land-use-a situation that requires cost and benefits policy estimation. This article thus highlights that the effect of water-energy-food nexus on environmental sustainability depends on several socioeconomic factors that require attention.