Description:

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, "Agriculture is the largest consumer of the world's freshwater resources, and more than one-quarter of the energy used globally is expended on food production and supply." The so-called Food-Water-Energy nexus is a well-known concept in environmental security due to the interrelationships among the individual components. When we consider that the global population may reach 9 billion people by mid-century, this nexus becomes even more crucial to our understanding of national and human security. This understanding is complicated by the knowledge that the "baseline" climate is itself evolving, along with potential for an increase in mass migrations and resource conflicts around the world. The area of environmental health is sometimes considered as a separate topic but there are certainly relationships to the traditional food-water-energy nexus, so this crucial topic has been added as an interest area for this session. This session is interested in highlighting research taking place within the traditonal components of the nexus, but also any new work that is exploring the interrelationships and dependencies among them.