The Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus: A Platform to Help Alleviate Threats to the Global Commons
The next presentation in the Texas A&M Energy Institute Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Rabi Mohtar, TEES Endowed Professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at Texas A&M University, will be held on Wednesday, November 30, 2016 from 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. in 111 Jack E. Brown Chemical Engineering Building. The topic will be “The Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus: A Platform to Help Alleviate Threats to the Global Commons.”
Abstract
The global commons are those resource domains lying outside of the political reach of any one nation state, and they include the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the land that provides our food. Significant threats to these resources – along with the ways in which those resources interact with one another – are ever-increasing. Therefore, there is an urgent need for integrated analytical frameworks to help understand the science of their interactions, interlinkages, and sustainable management.
Mohtar will explore how engineering and analytics interface with economics, policy, and the supply chain at the local and global scales. He will then address how a “nexus” approach can drive sustainable resources management and allocation. Describing the key research gaps that must be addressed to enable this greater understanding of the complex Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus, he will present examples of nexus-focused research from his own studies on the water-hydraulic fracturing-transportation nexus and describe the processes, analytical framework, scenarios, and tradeoffs in this system.
