The Global Energy Water Nexus

The purpose of the paper is to show how poorly understood the water-energy security nexus is. The significance of this invisible nexus and related environmental uncertainties hasve gained prominence in the past decade. This prominence has lagged the public profile of the global warming discourse.  It has become evident that there is a suite of global uncertainties about environmental and economic security and sustainability – suggesting the acronym GUESS.

Two centuries of the industrialisation of agriculture, of manufacturing, of services and of trade has had very serious impacts on the global natural resources of land, energy, water and the atmosphere. The processes of use, and the outcomes of such use, of these different global resources have not been equally well theorised. Nor has an analytical framework been developed to capture the grand nexus of water-food-trade-energy-climate change. Awareness of the energy/carbon-climate change element of the nexus has risen rapidly in the past three decades helped by concepts such as carbon footprints. The water-food-trade element of the nexus has, over the same period been well conceptualised with ideas such as embedded water and water footprints. It is only in the past decade, however, that the links between the industrialised use of water and energy across the international political economy has been identified. First, major players in the world economy – big-oil, big-auto, big-ag, big-food processing and trading – have been forced to consider the security, cost and finally the environmental sustainability of the ways they source and use natural resources. Sometimes their immediate, and certainly longer term, supply chains have been shown to be insecure. Secondly, important international NGO and some international agency voices have been significant in advancing awareness of the grand nexus. Meanwhile, national governments have been slow to join the discourse and have tended to restrain it.

The paper will rehearse the links and synergies that have been identified in this early phase of conceptualisation of the water-energy nexus. For example clean energy can be generated via hydropower or by producing bio-ethanol from biomass. Clean water can be produced by using energy intensive desalination and other water treatment technologies. These impacts have until now been invisible to water and energy users as well as to policy-makers.

The paper will conclude with a review of the importance of conceptualising the idea of sustainable intensification as seen through the lens of the grand nexus of water-food-trade-energy-climate change. The nearly seven billion current population has only been able to be supported by intensifying their natural resource using systems. This extraordinary achievement is proving to be environmentally unsustainable. It will be necessary to support about nine billions by further intensification. But in ways that are environmentally sustainable.