Addressing Complex Urban Interdependencies

Abstract

• Understanding how water, food, and energy interact in the form of the water-food-energy (WFE) nexus is essential for sustainable development which advocates enhancing human well-being and poverty reduction.

• The application of the WFE nexus has seen diverse approaches to its implementation in cities across the globe.

• There is a need to share knowledge in order to improve urban information exchange which focuses on the WFE nexus’ application and impacts on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.
• In this study,
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
  • Affinity Propagation Algorithm (APA)
• are employed to explore and assess the application of the WFE nexus:
  • first on a regional basis
  • second on the city level
• The results show that after the exhaustive search of a database containing:
  • 32,736 case studies focusing on
  • 2,233 cities,
• African and Latin American cities:
• have the most potential to encounter resource shortages (i.e., WFE limitation)
  • are systematically underrepresented in literature
  • Southern hemisphere cities can benefit from knowledge transfer because of their limited urban intelligence programmes.
• Hence, with regional and topic bias,
• there is a potential for more mutual learning links
• between cities that can increase WFE nexus policy exchange
• between the Northern and Southern hemispheres
• through the bottom-up case-study knowledge.