Integrated Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Causal Urban Food-Water-Energy Relations towards more Climate-Resilient Cities

Currently, the world is facing great challenges in terms of securing water, energy and food for all. With continuous increase in urbanisation and and changed lifestyles, the demand within the three sectors food, water and energy (FWE) in cities is increasing as well (Sukhwani et al., 2019). Due to the limited availability of natural resources, the pressure on urban land use is equally increased, thus more attention needs to be given to sustainability and resource efficiency. Furthermore, climate change and the related increasedfrequency of extreme weather events such as stormwater events and/or dry periods pose additional challenges for infrastructure and (agricultural) land use as well as for the quality of life. These challenges call for more systemic, integrated and cross-sectoral approaches helping to build resilient urban systems. These approaches should focus more on a holistic urban system transformation, rather than tackling problems within one sector. Thus, the main goal of reaching a sustainable future should be to create integrated, informed and well-coordinated interventions to support cities to become more climate resilient. As a response to the problem setting, the concept of FWE Nexus emerged. The Nexus describes and analyses the interlinkages between the three sectors, with the goal to identify potential synergies and minimise trade-offs between the three sectors (Hoff, 2011). The paper discusses a number of methods on how to describe the FWE system: Firstly, to show how different elements in the entire FWE system are interrelated and to create a common system view among the involved stakeholders, a qualitative system analysis, has been carried out. This qualitative system analysis enables experts (from FWE sectors, city authorities, urban planners) to understand the causal relations and the feedbacks between the system elements. Thus, to cope with the challenges and system immanent drivers, a basis for the discussion and development of strategies is established. The qualitative analysis was also used to gain a specific view on the differences between different case study regions. Secondly, based on this qualitative analysis, a more specific quantitative GIS-based analysis of land use changes and resulting water demand has been performed as input for a simulation model. This model will be used to analyse the impacts of spatial planning scenarios for the sustainable resources management and shall support urban planners to create more resilient cities and regions.