Integrating the Sustainable Development Goals with the Water-Energy-Food Nexus: A Model for Agro-Industrial Companies

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) express the ambition to achieve targets by 2030 for the Planet, as defined by the United Nations (UN). Under a similar perspective, the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus approach highlights that these three elements are intrinsically interconnected. Consequently, they should be evaluated and managed in an integrated way. The agro-industrial sector makes extensive use of the most demanded natural resources, and plays a major role in both frameworks. Therefore, proposing an integrated view for this sector, dealing with both the UN SDGs and the WEF nexus is relevant and promising, but challenging. This short note provides a proposition on the connections between the SDGs and WEF nexus for the agro-industrial sector, based upon available literature. Finally, the overall expected benefits are to impact the decreasing of the water used volume (ensuring its availability, and quality), the energy efficiency-enhancing (stimulating the replacement by clean energy sources), and to avoid food wastage and contamination during the process.