Modeling water-energy-food nexus for planning energy and agriculture developments: case study of coal mining industry in Shanxi province, China

Xu, X., Gao, J., Cao, G.-Y., Ermoliev, Y., Ermolieva, T., Kryazhimskiy, A.V., & Rovenskaya, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2761-3443 (2015). Modeling water-energy-food nexus for planning energy and agriculture developments: case study of coal mining industry in Shanxi province, China. IIASA Interim Report. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: IR-15-020

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Abstract

As the main energy in China, coal has been the guarantee for the sustainable and rapid development of the economy. It will remain to be the guarantee for energy security in China for a very long time. However China's reliance on coal has raised a number of urgent environmental, economic, and social issues. Despite the fact that CO2 emissions and air polluton are well known, land deterioration and high water consumption are less evident, but not any less severe. And those issues are a threat to energy, water, and food security in China.

The Chinese government has actively started addressing the problems related to the coal mining industy. Due to the isolation of the administrations and interdependencies among the problems, the issues are not being dealt with in a cordinated way. It is imperative to find a systemic way to analyze and deal with the development of the coal industry under the energy, water, and food security interdependencies. Herein, a model which is spatially detailed and could support the coal and agriculure production strategy under several resource and security constraints, has been developed. Through scenarios analyis, numerical experiments are carried out to illustrate the coal and agriculture productions under varying availability of water resources. In a visible way, we select some of the result to prove that the model can help select the optimal location and technologies sets of coal and agriculture production accounting for energy-food-water-environmental security constraints.

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