UC Berkeley

AbstractWater-Energy-Food Nexus: Decision-Support for Water Infrastructure Management By Sooyeon Yi Doctor of Philosophy in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning University of California, Berkeley Professor G. Mathias Kondolf, Chair

According to the US Food and Agriculture Organization, the projections reveal that the water, energy, and food demands will increase significantly over the next decades due to population growth, economic development, technological changes, and climate change. The rapidly growing body of literature on the water-energy-food nexus discusses addressing complex resource systems, amplifying synergies, mitigating the tradeoffs, and developing cross-sectoral policies. The water-energy-food nexus offers a promising approach to simultaneously addressing the water, energy, and food sectors. Though, this approach has some limitations and challenges in understanding the interconnection of all three sectors in a single study. To address this limitation, we synthesize the water-centered nexus in dual-sector, including the water infrastructure-environment, water-energy, and groundwater-food nexus. The three main objectives of this dissertation are to evaluate the water-centered nexus approach incorporating the interdependencies between dual-sector in water infrastructure, assess the effectiveness of the broad-to-narrow scale approach in the water-centered nexus study, and examine the role of the water-centered nexus approach in decision-making for the water infrastructure. A water-centered nexus is a nexus study that stretches the focus of water by including at least one other resource (e.g., energy, carbon, land) that depends on water. Chapter I (water infrastructure-environment nexus) provides a comprehensive inventory of inter-basin water transfer projects (built, ongoing, proposed) and proposes directions for future inter-basin water transfer projects in the US. Chapter II (water-energy nexus) develops subsequent monthly energy use predictive models for the Mokelumne River Aqueduct in California. Chapter III (groundwater-food nexus) investigates the groundwater level changes before- and after- fully and partially opening the Baekjae Weir. The main methods are collecting and analyzing the secondary data (Chapter I) and applying machine learning algorithms to simulate energy use forecasting models for the inter-basin water transfer project (Chapter II) and groundwater level prediction model for the weir (Chapter III). Results showed that a nexus approach supported a better understanding of the complexity and dynamics of interlinkages between water, energy, and food resources. A broad-to-narrow scale approach was effective in analyzing the overall characteristics of water infrastructures and assessing their national, regional, and local specific problems. The water-energy-food nexus approach can support the decision-making for the proposed inter-basin water transfer project (Chapter I), ongoing inter-basin water transfer project (Chapter II), and currently operating weir (Chapter III). Thus, the water-energy-food nexus approach is effective in practical planning, management, and decision support framework for the water infrastructure.