A framework for the environmental assessment of water-energy-food-climate nexus of crops: Development of a comprehensive decision support indicator

Abstract

The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus is the established framework to account for the three interlinked global security concerns of access to water, sustainable energy, and food security. Despite its outstanding relevance, a standardized methodology for quantifying the nexus and the related interconnections is still missing. Nowadays, life-cycle assessment (LCA) has been promoted as a key tool for quantifying the environmental impacts within WEF nexus although the normalization and weighting procedures require further investigations.The aim of the study is to develop an integrated water-energy-food-climate (WEFC) indicator adopting a life-cycle approach and to test its application in the agri-food sector, in order to pave the way for a decision-support tool to decision-makers.After selecting the relevant impact categories, a multi-variable optimization was carried out seeking the “best compromise” between water, energy, food, and climate issues. Then, a comparison-oriented analysis was performed to further examine the WEFC performances of the analyzed crops (tomato, corn, and pea) within an Italia case study.Overcoming the discrepancies that arise in the comparison of single environmental impact categories, the single WEFC indicator allowed to define tomato cultivation in Northern Italy by lateral infiltration, pea cultivation by pivot, and corn cultivation by pivot as the best trade-off scenarios for the analyzed sample. In this framework, the identification of best management scenarios is achieved by exploiting the potential synergies and the rational use of available resources, while the single indicator offers easy-to-read results for supporting decision makers.

Keywords

• Water-energy-food nexus
• Life Cycle Assessment
• Agri-food sector
• Decision Support Tool
• Crops