Abstract
With the increasing threat to water, energy, and food resources world-wide, it is highly imperative to manage these resources sustainably. This study develops an optimal crop area allocation model based on a novel nexus-sustainability index (NSI), integrating the water use, energy use (environmental dimension); land use, labour use (social dimension); yield return, and per capita food production (economic dimension) indicators in agricultural food production. This NSI-based model is evaluated in a reservoir-canal command for optimal water and energy uses and, subsequently, compared with the conventional models of Net-Economic Return (NER), Water-Food (W-F) nexus, and Energy-Food (E-F) nexus based approaches using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) analysis. The comparative results revealed that the NSI-based model is the best that could save water, energy and labour resources by 36.82(±1.91)%, 23.72(±2.47)%, and 2.29(±0.16)% during the Kharif season; and 17.5(±0.59)%, 19.82(±1.52)%, and 2.02(±0.42)% during the Rabi season as compared to the existing condition, respectively, enhancing the net economic return by 56.53(±3.28)% and 79.96(±2.97)% during the corresponding seasons, respectively. Finally, it is advocated that the NSI-based approach could manage the water and energy resources sustainably ensuring security in the local water-energy-land-food (WELF) nexus.
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14 July 2020
The original version of this article unfortunately contains mistake in equation 9. The mistake and correction is described below.
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We thank the government organizations (duly cited in the text) for providing relevant data required for the study. We also thank the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India, for providing the fellowship to the first author during the research tenure. We would like to extend our special thanks to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments in greatly improving the quality of this paper.
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Das, A., Sahoo, B. & Panda, S.N. Evaluation of Nexus-Sustainability and Conventional Approaches for Optimal Water-Energy-Land-Crop Planning in an Irrigated Canal Command. Water Resour Manage 34, 2329–2351 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-020-02547-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-020-02547-y