Simulations of the Water Food Energy Nexus for policy driven intervention

Y Teitelbaum; A Yakirevich; A Gross; S Sorek

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04767

Simulations of the Water Food Energy Nexus for policy driven intervention

Heliyon. 2020 Aug 23;6(8):e04767. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04767. eCollection 2020 Aug.

Authors

Y Teitelbaum¹, A Yakirevich¹, A Gross¹, S Sorek¹

Affiliation

¹ Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, J. Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion 849900, Israel.

Abstract

Water-Food-Energy (WFE) resources exert mutual influences upon each other and thus cannot be managed separately. Information on household WFE expenditures addresses knowledge that distinguishes between geospatial districts' social welfare. Social welfare and investment in districts' WFE resources are interconnected. District (node) product of WFE normalized expenditures (Volume) is considered as a representative WFE Nexus holistic quantity. This Volume is assumed to be a function of residents' knowledge of welfare level across districts. We prove that the Volume rate conforms to Boltzmann entropy, and this is the premise of our hypothesis for directed information from high to low welfare between network nodes. Welfare mass (WM) represents the district's Volume combined with its income and population density. This WM is used as input into a model balancing between all domain nodes that allows policymakers to simulate the effects of potential quantifiable policy decisions targeted to individual districts at a domain level while also considering influences between districts. Based on existing historic data, the established tool exemplifies its potential by providing outcomes for Israel districts showing the influence of imposing different temporal allocation/deallocation actions as managerial regulations to prescribed districts. It is found that districts with a high WM do not suffer when a defund is applied, but districts that have a low WM gain from subsidies.

Keywords: Computational fluid dynamics; Contaminant transport; Decision support systems (DSS); Environmental risk assessment; Finite element methods; Groundwater; Integrated water resource management and policy (IWRMP); Mathematical physics; Sustainable development; Water-Food-Energy (WFE) Nexus; Wave physics.