Supporting Decision-Making for the Nexus

A Sustainable Water-Food-Energy Nexus must connect the well-being demand of a community with its water and energy needs. A qualitative approach based on a holistic view should be able to identify the “bottlenecks” in the system in order to get a technical view and scope the analysis for the optimization and decision-making procedures to be applied.

We propose a methodology based on two steps: (a) Qualitative description of the system and (b) Quantitative assessment of the system behaviour. This enables a hierarchical methodology to support decision-making in different scenarios.

The Process Analysis Method (PAM) allows the identification of: a Guiding Process, Core Processes and Enabling Processes in order to develop the appropriate framework (1)

REFERENCES

Darton, R. (2015). Setting a policy for Sustainability: the importance of measurement in, “Assessing and Measuring Environmental Impact and Sustainability”. Chapter 14 Ed. Jiri Klemes. Butterworth-Heinemann