UN-Water – Water, Food and Energy
One-page synthesis showing agriculture's 70% share of freshwater withdrawals, embedded water in energy, and the need for joint planning as demand for all three sectors rises.
Access resourceFood-Energy-Water Resource Hub
Use this hub to grab the non-hallucinated stack: multilateral policy frameworks, U.S. strategy documents, analytical toolkits, and peer-reviewed syntheses that actually quantify water-energy-food trade-offs.
Everything depends on everything else—and most jurisdictions still govern with siloed agencies and 1970s laws. These references keep decision support honest.
Global & Multilateral Frameworks
One-page synthesis showing agriculture's 70% share of freshwater withdrawals, embedded water in energy, and the need for joint planning as demand for all three sectors rises.
Access resourceFAO's governance landing page framing the nexus as critical for food security and sustainable agriculture under population growth, diet shifts, and climate pressure.
Access resourcePDF that situates the nexus inside FAO's sustainable food agenda, links directly to SDGs 2, 6, 7, 13, and calls for cross-sector coordination in water-scarce, energy-poor regions.
Access resourceUnder the UNECE Water Convention, basin-scale assessments quantify trade-offs between hydropower, irrigation, energy, and environment, producing recommendations for riparian coordination.
Access resourceDefines the nexus as a policy approach for managing trade-offs across SDGs 2, 6, 7, 13, 15 and warns that siloed policies (e.g., biofuels incentives) create perverse impacts on food and water.
Access resourceProfessional & U.S. Programmatic Strategies
American Society of Civil Engineers guidance urging infrastructure planners to account for WEF interdependencies and to invest in integrated data and modeling.
Access resourceDOE's six strategic pillars (data, modeling, tech R&D, infrastructure, governance, international engagement) that effectively anchor the energy-water leg of FEW work.
Access resourceCross-agency memo identifying water stresses that cascade into energy, agriculture, and ecosystems while highlighting DOE and NSF FEW initiatives as national priorities.
Access resourceDefines FEW (food, energy, and water) systems as coupled natural-human systems with biophysical, social, and cyber components; proposals must span at least three disciplines and integrate food, energy, and water.
Access resourceAnswers common questions on interdisciplinary scope, agency roles, and how NSF integrates USDA/NIFA priorities into FEW solicitations.
Access resourceFrameworks, Toolkits & Basin Playbooks
Stepwise approach for quantifying water-energy-food-climate-ecosystem trade-offs across the Near East and North Africa, complete with SDG linkages.
Access resourceThe classic background paper that launched modern WEF narratives, still cited for its problem framing and graphics.
Access resourcePortal aggregating online courses, manuals, and decision-support methods for implementing the water-energy-food-ecosystems nexus.
Access resourceBudget justification that spells out the resilience, trade-off, and decision-support questions NSF wants FEW research to tackle.
Access resourceStakeholder-driven modeling experiment combining alternative futures for land, water, and energy to test FEW trade-offs under climate change.
Access resourceAcademic Reviews & Research Syntheses
Transforms FEW into measurable science with system-level metrics, water scarcity insights, and strategies for supply, demand, and storage.
Access resourceGlobal view of FEW interactions, including trade, virtual water, land-use change, and climate policy feedbacks.
Access resourceCompares FEW definitions and catalogs optimization, system dynamics, and multi-criteria decision-making approaches along with data and governance gaps.
Access resourceMaps which regions and sectors dominate FEW optimization literature and highlights blind spots around equity and uncertainty.
Access resourceFocuses on long-term simulations of household FEW consumption, climate impacts, and policy scenarios.
Access resourceCritiques sloppy use of the term "nexus" and proposes clearer boundaries for scales, system definitions, and metrics.
Access resourceLinks FEW decisions to health outcomes such as air quality, nutrition, and disease, including pandemic risk pathways.
Access resourceExplains how water management strategies in arid regions can embed nexus thinking for more resilient agriculture.
Access resourceAssesses how FEW policies treat urban agriculture and finds regulatory levers (zoning, building codes) outperform voluntary programs.
Access resourceCourses, Media & Practitioner Hubs
Curated list of FEW reports, academic articles, and educational resources, plus coverage of FEW in higher-ed curricula.
Access resourceRecorded talks, case studies, and panel discussions spanning MENA, Latin America, and more.
Access resourceFour-module MOOC introducing FEW concepts, climate impacts, and regional case studies with a technology + policy lens.
Access resourceRWTH Aachen course connecting sustainable development theory with WE-F nexus case studies for non-specialists.
Access resourceTeaches WEF nexus via system mapping and transdisciplinary thinking across water, energy, and food metabolism.
Access resource78-minute discussion on trade-offs and U.S. congressional policy levers, complete with downloadable slides.
Access resourceVideo panel on how climate, FEW, and environmental constraints interact, useful for stakeholder storytelling.
Access resourceRecorded talk exploring governance and equity considerations for WE-F planning in Arab states.
Access resourceCase-study webinar from the France-Arizona Institute on how global change stresses the FEW nexus in the Western United States.
Access resourceWhy This Matters
There is no Food-Energy-Water Act; it is a planning lens layered over legacy water, energy, and agricultural law.
The nexus work that sticks tends to pair governance statements with real data, models, and basin pilots (DOE Water-Energy report plus INFEWS proposals, for example).
Trade-off analysis keeps expanding: from water scarcity and virtual water to health, urban agriculture, and household-level consumption under climate stress.
Integrated decision support is a socio-technical problem—every effective project pairs hydrologists, agronomists, energy planners, social scientists, and community partners.
Share basin data, modeling needs, or policy briefs at info@envitrace.com so we can plug them into the FEW decision-support stack.