The Water-Energy-Food Nexus: Global, Basin, and local Case Studies of Resource Use Efficiency under Growing Natural Resource Scarcity

The project aims to conduct an assessment of tradeoffs and synergies across the water, energy and food sectors, including evaluation of opportunities for the decentralized energy production and use, as well as of entry points for increased resource use efficiency in Ethiopia’s Nile Basin.

The principal hypothesis of this project is that by holistically assessing water-energy-food security strategies with partners, tradeoffs across these sectors can be reduced and solutions can be identified that reduce adverse outcomes for poor men and women. The project will use a mixed methods approach that includes gender-disaggregated participatory rural appraisals, focus group discussions, gender-disaggregated data collection, policy dialogues with ENTRO and nested modeling across various scales--including the local, basin, and global scales, to identify tradeoffs and alternative management, technology and governance options that sustainably increase resource use efficiency; which each level of modeling serving as the boundary conditions for the next level of analysis.