Bassel Daher, Ph.D.

Water, Energy, Food Resource Challenges in Migration: Role of Informal Institutions

Water, energy and food are vital resources for human well-being, poverty reduction, and sustainable development. Demand for these resources is projected to increase due to population growth and will be affected by economic development, international trade, urbanization, diversifying diets, cultural and technological changes, climate variability, and migration trends. These current societal megatrends, coupled with environmental, […]

Water-Energy-Food Interconnections: Methods, Tools, and Cross-Sectoral Decision Making

Interdependence, interactions, and linkages refer how variables in a system connect, influence, and depend on one another. Scientific fields, especially the social sciences, primarily analyze how a given variable is affected by one or many others. Across-impact analysis is an approach to determine how those interactions can affect future events or a way to visualize […]

Water-Energy-Food Sustainable Development Goals in Morocco

Water, energy, and food security challenges are complex and tightly interconnected (Hoff 2011; Mohtar and Daher 2012; FAO 2014a; IRENA 2015). Food production demands water; water extraction, treatment, and redistribution demand energy; and energy production requires water. With growing pressures on these interconnected resource systems due to climate change and population growth, it is critical that we understand and […]

The relevance and challenges in communicating the nexus

Beyond academic debates, the nexus remains a new concept for many practitioners and decision-makers, with often only a fuzzy delineation (intersection of water, energy, food, land, climate, biodiversity, health, etc.) and limited attraction. In addition, its association to ‘complexity’ often hampers the uptake in solution-oriented and sector-specific planning and management, whilst simplified approaches are discarded […]

Beyond zero sum game allocations: expanding resources potentials through reduced interdependencies and increased resource nexus synergies

The 2030 goal for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gives rise to challenging questions stemming from the inherent interconnections and potential competition between primary resources. ‘Economic Growth’ and ‘Clean Water and Sanitation’ are intimately related SDGs. Access to quality water is critical to growth, but as economies and populations grow, so does […]

Trade-offs and Decision Support Tools for FEW Nexus-Oriented Management

Purpose Existing assessment and decision support tools have limited application to real-world food-energy-water (FEW) Nexus challenges. Integrated assessment approaches are often discipline-specific or highly theoretical, lacking grounding in real-world FEW issues. Recent Findings FEW systems require application of integrated techniques that address multiple attributes of trade-off analyses, dynamic and disparate datasets, and difficult decision contexts. […]