This book looks at the ways that energy, food, and water help to create connections between sustainability and security. The concept of security is in our current societies increasingly connected with sustainability, which seeks to ensure that we as humans are able to live and prosper on this planet now and in the future. The concepts of energy security, food security, and water security—used separately or together—manifest the burgeoning linkages between security and sustainability. This book brings together ten scientific articles that look at different aspects of security, sustainability, and resilience with an emphasis on energy, food, and/or water in the context of Finland and Europe. Together, the articles portray a rich picture on the diverse linkages between both energy, food, and water, and between security and sustainability. In sum, the articles and related preface conclude that ensuring sustainable security—or secure sustainability—requires systemic, structured processes that link the policies and actors in these two important but still distant fields.

This book looks at the ways that energy, food, and water help to create connections between sustainability and security. The concept of security is in our current societies increasingly connected with sustainability, which seeks to ensure that we as humans are able to live and prosper on this planet now and in the future. The concepts of energy security, food security, and water security--used separately or together--manifest the burgeoning linkages between security and sustainability. This book brings together ten scientific articles that look at different aspects of security, sustainability, and resilience with an emphasis on energy, food, and/or water in the context of Finland and Europe. Together, the articles portray a rich picture on the diverse linkages between both energy, food, and water, and between security and sustainability. In sum, the articles and related preface conclude that ensuring sustainable security--or secure sustainability--requires systemic, structured processes that link the policies and actors in these two important but still distant fields.

This book presents readers with an integrated modeling approach for analyzing and understanding the interconnection of water, energy, and food resources and discusses the relationship between resilience and sustainability of the food- energy –water (FEW) system. Authors provide novel frameworks, models, and algorithms designed to balance the theoretical and applicative aspects of each chapter. The book covers an integrated modeling approach for FEW systems along with developed methods, codes, and planning tools for designing interdependent energy, water and food systems. In-depth chapters discuss the impact of renewable energy resources in FEW systems, sustainable design and operation, net zero energy buildings, and challenges and opportunities of the FEW nexus in the sustainable development of different countries. This book is useful for graduate students, researchers, and engineers seeking to understand how sustainable FEW systems contribute to the resilience of these systems and help policy and design makers allocate and prioritize resources in an integrated manner across the food, energy, and water sectors.

It is beyond doubt that the interconnectedness between food, energy, water security and environmental sustainability exists and is getting amplified with increased globalization. It has been recognized that efforts to address only one part of a systemic problem by neglecting other inherently interlinked aspects may not lead to desirable and sustainable outcomes. In this perspective, policy- and decision- making requires a nexus approach that reduces trade-offs and builds synergies across sectors, and helps to reduce costs and increase benefits for humans and nature compared to independent approaches to the management of water, energy, food and the environment. In the past, work related to the Nexus has looked at the interactions between water and food or water and energy, but there has been a reluctance to bring forward a broader systematic perspective that captures the multiple sectors and resource dependencies while understanding its cost to the environment if we neglect these linkages. This book is a compilation of thirteen papers published previously as a special issue of Water International, contains significant pieces of work on the W-E-F nexus focusing on relevant tools, solutions and governance at local and broader human scales.

The increasingly interconnected, fast-moving, unmanageable and unpredictable world brings with it an unprecedented variety of known and as yet unknown challenges and risks. Some of the global risks have a direct impact on critical infrastructures as well as those of energy supply in particular. A high level of functionality of critical infrastructures (CRITIS), which include the sectors of energy, information technology and telecommunications, transportation and traffic, health, water, food, finance and insurance, government and administration, as well as media and culture, is indispensable for a modern industrial society. In the context of the Corona crisis of 2020/2021, the worldwide inadequate preparation for pandemics became obvious, although the probability of epidemic outbreaks and their global spread has increased significantly in recent decades and was thus predictable to a certain extent. Moreover, it has been shown that in a globally interconnected world, complex crisis phenomena can mutually amplify and thus escalate within a short period of time. In particular, the deficits in preparedness for major risks that became apparent in the course of the Corona pandemic cannot be managed by nation states alone, especially since the probability of such events has risen continuously in recent decades and will continue to increase with growing globalization and urbanization and, in particular, as a result of climate change and its consequences. This publication addresses the challenges of energy resilience and climate protection, which will require immense attention in the future.

This will be the first textbook on the integration of food, energy and water systems (FEWS). In recent years, the world has seen a dramatic rise in interdisciplinary energy and environmental courses and degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In the US for instance, the number and variety of such programs has increased significantly over the past decade, Simultaneously, national and international initiatives that integrate food, energy and water systems have been launched. This textbook provides a substantive introduction to the food-energy-water nexus suitable for use in higher level undergraduate and graduate level courses and for scholars moving into the field of nexus studies without a strong background in all three areas and the many aspects of nexus studies.