Published by Springer Nature
Rapid urbanization, accelerated industrialization, and population growth in the countries included in the vast and diverse region called Asia and the Pacific has brought a host of social, economic, and environmental challenges. Home to more than half of the world's population, increasing demands are placed on limited land and freshwater resources to meet today's and future food and energy demands.
A series of three interconnected books claims that the current, sector-by-sector approaches for management of water, energy, and food sectors is inefficient, costly, and inadequate. The world's leading experts in the region, who contributed the content of these books, claim that a new and integrated approach must be adopted for this "Nexus" of water, energy, and food security.
The Nexus approach is way to create policies that mutually benefit the growth in these sectors, while addressing potential tradeoffs and ensuring sustainable growth to meet the needs of future generations. In fact, this approach is strongly supported by the array of Sustainable Development Goals that were adopted by the world's leaders in 2015.
To accommodate the diversity of geographical, political, economic, social, and cultural diversity in the Asia Pacific region, three separate sub-regional books are developed: East and Southeast Asia, Central and South Asia, and the Pacific. Despite the diversity, several common threads of action have emerged.
All three books introduce complex links between water, energy and food security and provide a special focus on the various cross-cutting issues such as climate change, gender inequality, rapid urbanization, and resource access conflicts.
These books are the result of a multi-year collaboration between UNESCO, the Pacific Water Research Centre at Simon Fraser University (Canada), the University of New South Wales Global Water Institute (Australia), and the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (South Korea).
The East and Southeast Asian book analyses water-energy-food relationships based on different case studies to investigate the socioeconomic and environmental challenges. The transboundary nature of freshwater resources in this sub-region is closely related to energy security and food security. Given China's population size and its economic power, the book offers an analysis of its impact on regional trade and economic sustainability. The book provides new insights on Nexus solutions for policy makers, researchers, and practitioners.
The Central and South Asian sub-region sits at the middle of geographical, geopolitical, economic, and historical cross-roads. The independence of the Central Asian states in the 1990s has led to the emergence of common regional trade and political ties. The book focusing on this sub-region reviews how the long-term social and economic success of the region depends on water, energy, and food security. Approaches identified in the book - such as combined responses to climate disasters - offer advanced solutions that are essential to achieve long-term security.
The water-energy-food nexus approach offers a practical framework to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in the Central and South Asia subregion - particularly in addressing challenges related to climate change, rapid urbanization, poverty, sharing of resources across borders, and gender-based disparities.Prof. Zafar Adeel Executive Director, Pacific Water Research Centre, Simon Fraser University
The nexus approach has become a highly prominent solution to enhance water, energy, and food security in East and Southeast Asia, which has experienced rapid economic growth and massive environmental changes. Abundant scientific data suggest that without substantial reforms in policies and practices for water, energy, and food resources management, the region will face even more serious challenges arising from limited resources availability, environmental and economic questions, and social inequality.Eunhee Lee Senior Research Scientist, Korea Institute of Geoscience & Mineral Resources
The Blue Continent of the Pacific is uniquely placed to utilize a nexus approach to water, energy and food security as a region comprised largely of small island developing states. This region's high ambitions for climate action are a clarion call for a sustainable future and a nexus approach offers integrated environmental, societal, and economic benefits that will help achieve these ambitions.Dr. Andrew Dansie Senior Lecturer, Humanitarian Engineering, University of New South Wales
The small island developing states in the Pacific region - which include Micronesia, Polynesia, Melanesia - are encountering some especially urgent threats such as rising sea levels that are being exacerbated by climate change impacts, including increased storm intensities. In other parts of the region, Australia and New Zealand's population has grown from ca. 10 million in 1950 to 31 million in 2020 and are increasingly impacted by major bushfire and floods events. The uniqueness of the Pacific and the need for a Pacific-led approach to sustainability across environmental, societal, and economical spheres of this blue continent are presented in this book.
Some cross-cutting themes appear to be common across all three subregions: Empowerment of women - particularly those in rural areas, who often play a key role in agriculture and fisheries - to undertake Nexus-based actions can yield far-reaching benefits.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented humanitarian and health crisis through all subregions of the Asia Pacific region, taking millions of lives and causing wide-ranging impacts on the economy and job market, leading to rising poverty. The Nexus approach offers a way to achieve a greater resilience in the society by building back better and choosing an alternative path for growth and development.
About the books:
About UNESCO
UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It seeks to build peace through international cooperation in education, sciences and culture. UNESCO's programmes contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals defined in the 2030 Agenda, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015.
Additional Notes
The following regional definitions are used in the three books:
East and Southeast Asia subregion includes including Brunei Darussalam, China, Cambodia, Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), Indonesia, Japan, the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Republic of Korea (South Korea), Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Central and South Asia subregion includes Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka in the south, and Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in the central part of Asia.
The Pacific subregion comprises 17 sovereign countries (Australia, Cook Islands [Kūki 'Āirani], Federated States of Micronesia [FSM], Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Zealand [Aotearoa], Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea [PNG], Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu) and seven territories (American Samoa, French Polynesia, Guam, New Caledonia, Northern Mariana Islands, Tokelau, and Wallis and Futuna).
