Recent years have shown increased awareness that the use of the basic resources water, food, and energy are highly interconnected (referred to as a ‘nexus’). Spatial scales are an important but complicating factor in nexus analyses, and should receive more attention – especially in the policy-oriented literature. In this paper, we ‘unpack' the nexus concept, aiming to understand the differences between water, food and energy resources, especially in terms of spatial scales.

It is a major challenge to achieve the goal of increasing grain yield, nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) and irrigation water productivity (IWP) in cereals. This study investigated if progressive integrative crop management technology in rice (Oryza sativa L.) could improve agronomic and physiological performances, and consequently, increase grain yield, NUE and IWP.

As an agro-food industry, sugar industry contributes to about 12% of the world’s sugar production with annual production capacity of 23 million tonnes. The sugar industry is a major water user and wastewater producer. According to Gunjal and Gunjal14, there are around 530 sugar industries in India having crushing capacity of 1.6 million tonnes per day utilizing 3.2 million m 3 of water, generating 0.6 million m 3 of effluent per day.

Original Source

A critical question for agricultural production and food security is how water demand for staple crops will respond to climate and carbon dioxide (CO2) changes, especially in light of the expected increases in extreme heat exposure. To quantify the trade-offs between the effects of climate and CO2 on water demand, we use a ‘sink-strength’ model of demand which relies on the vapour-pressure deficit (VPD), incident radiation and the efficiencies of canopy-radiation use and canopy transpiration; the latter two are both dependent on CO2.