The need for universal metrics in the energy-water-food nexus

Abstract

The ability for a new food-energy-water (FEW) initiative or program to thrive and prove valuable at a local, national, or international scale is often critically dependent not on the power or impressiveness of its technical innovation, but the ability for that innovation to be introduced, and subsequently welcomed, into a society. As the global population expands, there is an inevitable increase in competition for vital resources. The interaction of these resources—namely, food-energy-water—is referred to as the FEW Nexus. Water is the key resource that is in limited supply, and as the demand grows for energy and food dependent on it, so does global inequality and suffering. It is only through technical and socially aware innovations that these allocation issues can be addressed. Universal metrics, though flawed, are needed to help compare and contrast new FEW Nexus projects and technologies for those that need to plan and implement interventions to improve access to these vital resources. Social stickiness, or society’s willingness and ability to adopt and apply FEW Nexus interventions, is a vital component of these universal metrics. Social stickiness measures the ability of innovations to be successfully transferred from “science lab” to “social life” in order to educate and improve the global quality of existence through widespread and educated user adoption. Existing FEW program/technology metrics usually define an output per unit input (e.g., kWh/m³) and are limited to two areas the FEW Nexus with an obvious, but undefined association to the third (e.g., less water for agriculture). All technical metrics appear to treat the FEW Nexus as a static problem with no social or cultural context. Consequently, universal metrics should include a social measure of the target population as well as the traditional output/input measurements. The United Nations’ inequality-adjusted human development index (IHDI) could be a way to quickly include a social component to assess an innovation’s usability and improvement in the global community. The FEW needs and constraints found in developed and developing countries vary drastically, meaning that any universal metric that is created will not account for the complexity of the international situation, but would still be a useful tool to compare and contrast different innovations for local non-experts seeking to implement them.

Appendix 1

Guide for creating social stickiness for food-energy-water programs

To begin, the availability and awareness [REF: An Empirical Test of an Export Adoption Model: Jeen-Su Lim, Thomas W. Sharkey, and Ken I. Kim MIR: Management International Review Vol. 31, No. 1 (1st Quarter, 1991), pp. 51–62] of FEW interventions is paramount to success. For any innovative FEW program to succeed, its beneficiaries must be aware of its availability and interested in learning how to use it properly. Therefore, a successful FEW initiative will not only be flexible and dynamic enough to be made available to a variety of areas suffering from the specific FEW issue, but its contents should be conducive to communicating its appeal to diverse audiences in a culturally sensitive and inviting way. As an example, let us consider an innovative campaign designed to educate beneficiaries on the importance of using clean water to wash their hands before eating. Using this paper’s metrics, this campaign would be more successful if it was constructed in such a way that it could be made available and appealing to both schoolchildren and adult caretakers, as opposed to only one type of audience. In other words, the larger the number of beneficiaries aware of the availability of the FEW-related intervention and interested in learning about it, the more successful the effort.

Secondly, the education initiative accompanying the FEW intervention, as well as the educators’ attitude [Understanding Technology Adoption: Theory and Future Directions for Informal Learning Evan T. Straub Review of Educational Research Vol. 79, No. 2 (Jun., 2009), pp. 625–649] will be enormously impactful in the intervention’s success. While researchers debate the relative importance of the educator and adopter in studying successful innovation strategies, it is clear that the passing of knowledge from instructor to beneficiary sets the tone for subsequent use. While individuals will inevitably bring their own normative and behavioral biases to new practices, the interaction between teacher and student will not only serve to transfer vital content (i.e. information) from one person to another, but also attitudes. For example, past studies have shown time and again that children learn best and learn to prefer, and performer better, in subjects when their instructors promote a hands-on (i.e. interactive), supportive and transparent atmosphere where questions and dialogue are welcomed [Success and Failure on Classroom Tasks: Adaptive Learning and Classroom Teaching Mary Rohrkemper, Lyn CornoThe Elementary School Journal, Vol. 88, No. 3, Special Issue: Schoolwork and Academic Tasks (Jan., 1988), pp. 296–312]. In these cases, failure is viewed not as final but functional - and children are encouraged to learn from their past mistakes and re-engage with the material quickly and robustly. Using this second component of the paper’s metric, a FEW-related intervention would be more successful if its educational campaign was conducted in a way that not only transferred key knowledge from instructor to beneficiary in a culturally-sensitive and understandable way, but also created a positive view of the intervention in the community. The combination of successful information- and positive-attitude- transfer will add to the impact and “social stickiness” of the intervention in a way that would be promising for not only present but future use and efficacy. In other words, the most positive the feedback from beneficiaries after their initial training/education on the FEW-related intervention, the more successful the effort.

Finally, the long-term adoption of the innovative FEW programming is critical in gauging its value going forward [Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy, David Crocker]. While the FEW-nexus has long posed significant challenges to the global population, the specific pain points of its constraints and geographic locations of its complexities are evolving as quickly as our global population grows and diversifies. In order to remain useful in the long-term, successful FEW-related interventions will need to create opportunity for collaborative improvement that will allow beneficiaries and other stakeholders to contribute to its evolution in a democratic and interactive way. In the developed world, the best example of this type of continuous improvement and interactive learning is exemplified in crowdsourced wiki-sites that allow a community of users to share experiences, lessons learned, and best practices with others. However, these types of learning fora are often limited to areas with reliable Internet and plentiful technological supplies. FEW-related interventions, by their very nature, are often most in need of attention where these very circumstances are absent, making this third criterion a key differentiator in a FEW-focused effort’s social success and longevity. Recent research suggests a key tool in solving this dilemma will be the strategic creation and maintenance of public-private partnerships, with public sector actors identifying specific population’s needs and private sector counterparts supplying those resources. If these types of partnerships can be encouraged and sustained to support FEW-focused efforts, it will help ensure that the FEW innovations of this day and age are sustainable, far-reaching, and well-funded [Balancing Social innovation in Technology with Social Inclusion: Dan Swinney. “The Bridge.” Fall 2015, Volume 45, No. 3]. In other words, the more stakeholders that can contribute to and shape the future of a FEW-related effort in a way that will enhance its longevity and value in a variety of communities, the more successful the effort will be.