CS9: Climate Resilience, Water–Energy–Food and Agriculture

The expansion of bioenergy has become a central strategy for improving energy security and reducing carbon emissions in emerging economies. However, bioenergy production is inherently embedded within the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus, where resource constraints may generate trade-offs that challenge sustainable energy transitions. Despite extensive conceptual discussions, limited empirical evidence quantifies how nexus conditions influence bioenergy development at the macroeconomic level.
This study develops a hybrid WEF–econometric framework to examine the impact of resource nexus performance on bioenergy generation in five ASEAN countries-Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines-over the period 2009–2024. A composite WEF Nexus Index is constructed using normalized indicators capturing water availability and stress, energy access and security, and food productivity and vulnerability. The index integrates both access and resource availability dimensions to reflect systemic constraints.
Using panel data models with country fixed effects, the analysis estimates the elasticity of bioenergy generation with respect to overall nexus performance, while controlling for GDP per capita, population growth, energy import dependency, carbon intensity, and biofuel policy mandates. Preliminary results suggest that stronger overall WEF performance is positively associated with bioenergy expansion. However, disaggregated estimations reveal asymmetric effects: improvements in energy security significantly stimulate bioenergy output, while higher water stress and food vulnerability dampen expansion in resource-constrained economies. Interaction effects indicate that policy mandates moderate these constraints by enhancing production efficiency rather than intensifying resource use.
The findings contribute to energy economics by empirically validating nexus constraints as structural determinants of renewable energy transition pathways. For policymakers, the results highlight the necessity of integrated resource governance frameworks to support sustainable bioenergy growth in developing regions.

Households experience hundreds of millions of dollars in private property damage every year to foreseeable natural disasters like hurricanes, even though low-cost measures exist that if implemented would mitigate the damage. How public authorities communicate natural disaster risk may influence whether households take preventative action and what action they take. The information content of a warning message about an impending hypothetical hurricane was experimentally varied, in a questionnaire-based RCT administered in Jamaica. The control warning message resembles those issued by meteorological offices today, while the treatment messages vary the presentation of the information contained in the message. Individuals are found more likely to act – and to take certain specific adaptive actions – when the warning message uses non-technical language and when it includes pro-social disaster relief images. Implications for risk communication theory, and for meteorological and disaster preparedness authorities in hurricane-prone countries, are elaborated.

Poverty in Indian agricultural ecosystem has been widely studied, but what is not known is that, this has led to inequality of access to energy, fertilizers and information. The Gini coefficient of irrigation was estimated to be 0.66 and agricultural landholding, 0.6, showing that rural agro-societies suffer from rampant marginalization and inequality that prevents agricultural economic development. With fertilizer security in India being low (40-50% imports of Di-Ammonium Phosphate – DAP), poorer farming communities often face steep fertilizer prices by imposed loans by local distributors. This creates a positive feedback loop with suboptimal fertilizer use, degrading soil fertility, resulting in poor crop yields, that furthers poverty due to extremely low annual income (< $1200/family annually).
Our target is to present a framework that disrupts this vicious cycle through technological intervention of ammonia (NH3) and DAP co-production via direct electrolytic reduction, using excess renewable energy. Moving away from the traditional Haber-Bosch (HB) method, which is responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions, NH3 synthesis via direct electrolysis of N2 and H2O offers the benefit of environmental sustainability in the agricultural sector. Unlike HB method, our proposed NH3 synthesis can be adopted at micro-scale (< 1 ton/day) and integrated with decentralized DAP manufacturing units, that not only ensures high-grade fertilizer availability to vulnerable farmers, but also enables them to be engines of development by building DAP-export potential.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.0px 'Helvetica Neue'} South Africa is committed to Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. Underneath these commitments is the need to address the key infrastructure gaps in relation to energy, water, and food (WEF) sectors. However, the provisioning structures of water, energy, and food systems are fragmented; for example, the South African government is largely responsible for water and electricity provisioning, and the private sector, specifically farmers and supermarkets, is responsible for food provisioning. It is this disintegration that has made it difficult to collectively understand what system changes (whether regulatory, economic, institutional, financial, or policy) are required to achieve policy goals by 2050. Recent joint studies led by a partnership between government entities estimated a substantial investment gap and investment requirements to achieve water, energy, and food security by 2050. It is within this context that the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate interdependencies of the water-energy-food sectors and their impact and risk propagation within each sector and in macrofinancial dynamics, financing needs, and sectoral dynamics. To achieve this, we develop a General Monetary and Multisectoral Macrodynamics for the Ecological Shift – South Africa (GEMMES-SA), which is a non-equilibrium macrofinancial model designed to capture the interactions between macro-financial dynamics (such as GDP, inflation, exchange rates, balance of payments), financing needs (investment pathways, debt vs. equity, domestic vs. foreign), and industrial dynamics (employment, export, and import). In all simulated scenarios, we found that instability in one sector does not only affect the other two sectors but also has impacts on prices, trade, exchange rates, green investments, and employment. This application of GEMMES-SA within the WEF nexus provides policymakers with useful insights into understanding and assessing the risks, constraints, vulnerabilities, and opportunities of their policy choices.

The increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (EWEs) pose growing challenges to electricity systems worldwide, raising critical policy questions about how power systems operate and adapt under climate stress. This study assesses the impacts of EWEs on electricity generation in Brazil, a country with one of the world's largest interconnected power system and a generation mix largely based on renewable sources. Using an international disaster records database and operational data from the Brazilian electricity system, the analysis combines superposed epoch analysis to quantify generation responses to extreme events with an artificial intelligence approach (XGBoost) to examine how key energy inputs shape system performance during periods of climate stress. The results show that flooding events-the most frequent EWE in Brazil-have produced increasingly asymmetric impacts in recent years. While earlier periods exhibit limited effects, floods since 2019 have significantly increased hydroelectric generation while reducing photovoltaic output. The machine-learning analysis based on XGBoost modeling further highlights the growing importance of hydrological inputs during extreme events, indicating that input availability and management become more influential under climate stress. The findings suggest that energy system resilience depends not only on the composition of the generation mix but critically on how technologies and their inputs respond to and are managed during extreme conditions. From a policy perspective, these results support an international agenda for electricity planning that incorporates climate stress testing, adaptive system operation, and explicit consideration of input sensitivity as central elements of resilience-oriented energy strategies.