| dc.description.abstract | Food, Energy, and Water (FEW) security is essential for human beings to live in modern societies. Challenges such as climate change and population growth made it much more difficult to achieve FEW security. This dissertation study aims to explore and address the issues in achieving FEW security for societies in developing and developed countries as they usually face different sets of challenges. We first focus on exploring the relationships and interrelationships in the FEW nexus using a data-driven approach in 38 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where data is available. Specifically, we ask: among FEW resources, and human capacity factors, which are the predominant factors driving the FEW resource-to-service conversions; and among FEW services and human capacity factors, what could affect the FEW-related human health issues, such as diarrhea (water), deaths due to air pollution (energy), and malnutrition issues among young-age children (food)? We found that rather than lack of the FEW resources, the governance and socioeconomic capacity are the primary factors in influencing the FEW services and health issues in SSA, but not elsewhere. Improving governance and developing human capacity could help the FEW services provision and pose less harm to human health.
While the previous country-level analysis elucidated the complex relationships of FEW nexus, the FEW activities, services provision, and specific challenges like drought or flood are happening in smaller scales such as city or regional level. We therefore select Cape Town in South Africa to examine how the city could avoid the “Day-Zero” crisis and improve the FEW services during intense drought. We developed an agent-based model in which we model the water consumption of municipal water users as the water agent, we model the hydropower generation of Steenbras upper dam as the energy agent, and we model the irrigation of the wine grape farmers as the food agent. We compare two scenarios for responding to drought: business-as-usual (BAU), and holistic-adaptive-management (HAM), where BAU takes no action until the monthly supply is insufficient to meet demand, whereas HAM takes action by raising water tariffs when the reservoir storage level drops below its pre-drought monthly average. Our results suggest the HAM- a simple adaptive approach, can alleviate the impact of drought on agricultural production, hydropower generation, and the availability of water for residential consumption.
FEW security is not only to ensure people have enough food, energy, and water; it also means to protect the quality and safety of the services. In the previous analyses, we have limited data that allow us to examine the quality of the FEW services, such as drinking water quality. Such data is however readily available in developed countries such as the United States. Thus we gathered the measurement data (concentrations of chemicals) of the drinking water quality from the public water systems (PWSs) and combined them with Safe Drinking Water Information System database (SDWIS) violation records to study the factors that influence the drinking water quality of PWSs in Tennessee, USA. We find that different types of violations are more frequent in different types of systems, in certain geological regions, in more densely populated counties, and in places with abundant surface water. We also find that the distribution of measured concentrations for many contaminants is not smooth but is punctuated by discontinuities at selected levels, such as at 50% of the maximum contaminant level (MCL) specified in regulations.
This dissertation have explored the successes and failures of the provision of food, energy, and water services as all the stakeholders, from policymakers to farmers, people working in the FEW service sector, and all people in general, interact with nature in the socio-environmental system in both developing and developed world and at different scales. We found that the commonalities throughout the study are that the governance and human capacity are the most prominent factors to influence the societies’ ability to provide adequate FEW services to the people. The study also encountered data limitation issues frequently, which indicated a need to construct an interdisciplinary database for researchers studying the pathways to achieve the FEW security. To achieve FEW security, we have to put research into action and use good science to inform policy. All the stakeholders need to work together so we may be able to find the pathways of achieving FEW security for the world. | |
