The role of “nature” in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus: insights from an interdisciplinary process of knowledge creation

Integrated approaches to managing natural resources are increasingly needed in a complex and interconnected world to meet growing demands for water, energy, and food, while preserving ecosystem integrity and promoting equitable access to resources. One such approach is the WaterEnergy-Food (WEF) Nexus, which offers a cross-sectoral framework to navigate trade-offs and leverage synergies across interlinked sectors. Although ecosystems were not originally considered a formal component of the Nexus, their vital role in supporting water, energy, and food systems -and in regulating the interactions between them- is gaining recognition among Nexus scholars and practitioners. To review and discuss existing efforts that integrate ecosystems into the WEF Nexus, we -a multidisciplinary team of natural resource management researchers and systems thinkers from the European network NEXUSNET COST Actionundertook a collaborative process of knowledge creation. Researchers from both the Nexus and Ecosystems community were involved in literature analysis, expert elicitation during workshops, and collaborative writing. Our analysis revealed a wide range of concepts used in the literature to represent “nature” within the Nexus, including terms like “environment,” “ecosystems,” “ecosystem services,” and “biodiversity.” Three main conceptual paradigms on the role of “nature” in the Nexus were also isolated: (i) ecosystems as a fourth component of the Nexus, i.e., the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) Nexus; (ii) ecosystems as the foundational layer underpinning the Nexus; and (iii) the WEF Nexus as a central component of social-ecological systems (SES). We put forward a WEFE Nexus hybrid paradigm that expands the mutual interlinkages among water, energy and food to the entirety of SES, thus acknowledging the social-ecological processes that are affected by and affect the WEF Nexus. The hybrid paradigm represents a piece of common and integrated knowledge that has emerged from the sharing of individual viewpoints and mental models, ultimately providing researchers with means to better understand the WEFE Nexus.