The Nile Water Food and Energy Nexus Model

Abstract

This is the author accepted manuscript.The Water, Food and Energy (WFE) Nexus is a useful concept to address the interlinkages among these resources on which we depend to achieve socio-economic and environmental goals in a sustainable way. WFE are interconnected in different ways and an action in one sector would not only affect that but could have significant impacts on the other sectors. The Nile basin is a transboundary river which is currently challenged by rapid population and economic growth that sparked development plans aimed at meeting growing demands for WFE. Currently, water, food and energy are still managed separately and there is a little attention given to the interactions between the WFE and socio-economic drivers and the potential for a transboundary cooperation on WFE matters in the Nile basin. A System Dynamics Modelling (SDM) approach is proposed for this study as it: (a) provides a unique framework to address the interlinkages among subsystems in a complex dynamic system, and (b) has the ability to capture the dynamic feedback between system components. A water balance for the entire Nile basin is integrated with the food, energy, population and economic sectors in Egypt. The underlying structure of each submodel was presented. The calibration and the model simulations results were presented, and the model showed a satisfactory performance