The water-food-energy nexus optimization approach to combat agricultural drought: a case study in the United States

Jie Zhang, Pietro Elia Campana, Tian Yao, Yang Zhang, Anders Lundblad, Forrest Melton and Jinyue Yan

Applied Energy, 2018, vol. 227, issue C, 449-464

Abstract: The frequent recent drought events in the Great Plains of United States have led to significant crop yield reductions and crop price surges. Using an integrated water-food-energy nexus modelling and optimization approach, this study laid the basis for developing an effective agricultural drought management system by combining real-time drought monitoring with real-time irrigation management. The proposed water-food-energy simulation and optimization method is spatially explicit and was applied to one major corn region in Nebraska. The crop simulations, validated with yield statistics, showed that a drought year like 2012 can potentially reduce the corn yield by 50% as compared to a wet year like 2009. The simulation results show that irrigation can play a key role in halting crop losses due to drought and in sustaining high yields of up to 20t/ha. Nevertheless, the water-food-energy relationship shows that significant investments on water and energy are required to limit the negative effects of drought. The multi-criteria optimization problem developed in this study shows that the optimal crop yield does not necessarily correspond to the maximum yield, resulting in potential water and energy savings.

Keywords: Water-food-energy nexus; Drought; Optimization; Energy for irrigation; Crop modelling; Spatial analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191730908X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:227:y:2018:i:c:p:449-464

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2017.07.036

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().