Involving Resilience In Assessment of The Water-Energy-Food Nexus For Arid And Semiarid Regions

Abstract The proper planning of the water-energy-food nexus is key for urban sustainability. However, the security of water, energy, and food is posed at risk due to uncertain events such as natural disasters. The quantification of resilience in water-energy-food systems has gained relevance in recent years and has served as a key tool to identify vulnerable areas. This work presents a systematic approach to assessing the resilience of the water-energy-food nexus in arid/semiarid regions that present low availability of resources. A methodology for assessing the resilience of the water-energy-food nexus of an arid region is presented, which allows evaluating the system under the disturbances of natural disasters such as hurricanes, low-temperature events, and droughts. The events in which failures in functional services may occur are analyzed using penalty costs. To apply the proposed approach, scenarios corresponding to past conditions and future projections were evaluated for two Mexican arid cities. The results show that it is possible to identify vulnerable areas related to the existence of natural disasters and thereby look for alternatives to maintain the security of the nexus. The proposed approach is general, and it can be applied to other regions with similar characteristics.