Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The United Nations expects the world population to grow at least until 2050 and peak at 11.2 billion people in 2100. Per capita consumption of resources will also increase and lead to even higher energy and water consumption and a larger environmental footprint. At the same time, the availability of natural resources is decreasing due to overexploitation, environmental degradation, and climate change. The world is in the middle of a sustainability crisis that will only deepen if vigorous actions are not taken. While willingness to act is slowly building in the political sphere, there is a lot of controversy around the right interventions to pursue. Even a well-intentioned intervention in one sector (e.g., water) can impede efforts in other sectors (e.g., energy, food security, environmental quality). Sustainability was promoted at the center of the global agenda with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A key feature of the 'SDGs is recognizing that "action in one area will affect results in others, and that development must balance social, economic and environmental sustainability." The need to consider the positive and negative interactions between interventions and objectives in different sectors is not new. It has led to various holistic approaches to environmental decision-making, such as integrated management of natural resources, integrated water resources Management, Virtual Water, Water Footprint, and, more recently, multiple variations of the Food-Energy-Environment-Water nexus (WE2F). All these frameworks aim to promote resource management that transcends sectors, disciplines, and scales, and the main differences reside in the number and relative weights of disciplines/scales/sectors included. The WE2F nexus focuses on the interlinkages across three key sectors, namely the water, energy, and food sector, and their relations to environmental sustainability. While the WE2F nexus is a conceptually exciting idea, the complexity of the natural system and the lack of understanding of the interdependencies and connections across the WE2F systems are significant barriers to its implementation. This research program aims to develop a framework to help implement a nexus approach in large-scale water infrastructure development (dams, urban water systems, and irrigation schemes). The framework will rely on deterministic modeling for areas where sufficient knowledge and data are available and statistical modeling/deep learning for insufficient conceptual understanding. The framework will be tested on the Gatineau watershed in Ontario and Quebec, Canada, and the Niger River in Western Africa. The framework is expected to be flexible enough to adapt to the unique challenges related to data availability and quality in each of the two test watersheds.